I am glad to be chosen to test this new Fujifilm new Camera and lens for actual field test here (Tropical forest) which also included Borneo – (Sepilok, Danum Valley, Kinabatangan River) for ~2months.

*** all pictures and videos captured with Fujifilm X-H2s pre-Production unit

For pass 2 months, I putting the system into various enviromennts

1. Tropical forest – real dark, complex environment

2. mangrove – hot and open area

3. river cruise – mainly shoot from shaky boat handheld

4. beach, mudflat – open hot area

As I am not able to open the RAW file and some firmware limitation, I am shooting mostly JPEG. So I am concentrate my testing on

1. New Autofocus system

– animal (bird) eye detection

– AF tracking

2. Size, Weight & Image Stabilizer

– as the system just weight 2.4 KG for 900mm (35 mm equivalent) so this is a good handheld system. So good IS is require.

3. Image Quality

– only based on JPEG

– New lens Focal length and new camera

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Size, Weight & Image Stabilizer

The new system just weight 2.4KG which allow us to shoot 150-600mm (225-900mm 35mm equivalent) which is one best available

sample of 225mm vs 900mm

– you can see how far we can reach with the 900mm

– most of the pictures and videos captured handheld. This system allow me have >50% success rate 1/125 at 900mm which is my recommended minimum shutter speed for handheld.

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New Autofocus system

For the Auto-focus, I think this is a huge upgrade compare previous X series. The Animal Detection just simple amazing

 

– refer 0:40:00″ – 1:48:00″ of the Video for how the Bird eye detect and focus in various situation

1:49:00 – 2:17:00 for how the eye detect work in lowlight (night time with torch)

 

And for AF tracking, please refer “1:50:00 – 2:18:00” for how the fast flying woodswallow flying tracking performance

 

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Image Quality

not able to open any RAW file so all captured in JPEG, picture with crop, denoise (Topaz) (if you want to have a look at the without denoise feel free drop me an message)

lets have a look at the picture and click to view larger size

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Tripod
ISO2000
F7.1
1/8
391.4 mm
Topaz Denoise

 

Some videos captured with this setup

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I will slowly update other experience of this setup on new post, if I have chance to test on the production system.

Stay tune

 

Overall my experience on this new setup on Wildlife Photography, this combo is very light and have long reach. even the aperture is small but we always can not shooting at maximum focal length so we can have slight bigger aperture. eg. shooting at 400mm (600mm 35mm equivalent) with F7.1

with the lens and In-Body-Stabilizer, it allow me capture 900mm at 1/125s with high success rate. (>50%). Anything lower, I would suggest to use tripod (as mentioned I am using pre-production camera the actual camera may different)

The AF is fast and accurate (on bird eye), it may not best in market but it is very good and accurate even at low-light & complex environment.

Tracking is good as long as non complex background, the track is give very good success rate too.

Weather resistant, I am shooting at various environment  … raining, humid tropical forest and under hot sun beach etc