the bandwagon

As you probably know I love photography.  I'm a little less keen on the gear side of things, but it's necessary to keep abreast of things and also, sometimes at least, to publish my feelings on a piece of equipment.

Anyway, I recently bought myself a new camera - a Fujifilm X-T5.

I bought it because of its extra resolution over its predecessors.  The sensor saw an increase in resolution from 26 to 40 megapixels.  The other improvements in areas like autofocus or shooting burst rates didn't interest me.

One thing nearly stopped my buying it though.  And that was Fujifilm's list of its lenses that were optimised to take advantage of the new sensor, and in particular the fact that my favourite lens, the 10-24mm wide-angle zoom, was not on the list.

But I still bought it anyway!

Then I started seeing negative reviews, in particular criticising the performance of the very lens I use most on the new camera.  Bad review after bad review kept cropping up in my YouTube feed making me question my purchase.

you can watch the video by clicking above

So, I decided to conduct my own tests.  Would I be able to replicate the gloomy, muddy and soft images the critics said they were seeing.  And I couldn't.  All the images I was seeing were beautifully sharp and clear, with no hint of any muddiness at all.

I then started to wonder where all the bad reviews were coming from.  And I thought the only reason could be that an early reviewer with a pre-production camera had seen this poor image quality, and then everyone who may only have the camera for a day or two jumped on that bandwagon, parroting the early review.  Call it lazy journalism, it's an easy thing to do.

Either that or my eyes are so bad I can't see properly!

I've shot enough cameras and lenses in my time though I think that I know a good photograph and either great, adequate or poor image quality when I see it.