Fujifilm X70 review – Performance
The 28mm equivalent lens is perfect for the landscape photographer, but it can be a little restrictive for some applications
The X70 is a very nice camera to use once you’ve got the various function buttons dialled in to suit your way of shooting. If you’ve shot with the X100T, you do miss the viewfinder, but the tilt-angle screen is a nice pay-off, perfect for those low-angle and waist-level shots. Screen clarity is good and the touchscreen functionality has integrated nicely with the camera’s other controls, making it quick to flick through images and pinch-and-zoom to look a little closer. It does make you wonder how long it’ll be before we see this touchscreen functionality creep into Fujifilm’s range of X-mount Compact System Cameras. During shooting I found it a little annoying that you couldn’t simply tap the screen to focus – all you’re doing is selecting the focus area, and while the Touch Shooting mode both focuses and fires the shutter, it feels like there’s a mode missing in between.
The multi-zone metering used by the X70 is very reliable, even under tricky circumstances
The X70’s multi-zone metering system seems to judge most scenes pretty accurately and, combined with the live preview on screen, it’s easy to dial in the necessary exposure compensation thanks to the logically positioned exposure compensation dial. While there’s no lock to avoid it being knocked out of place, I didn’t find this to be an issue – there’s just enough resistance there to make it hard to do so.
The new 28mm f/2.8 equivalent also performs well, with our lab results showing that distortion is very well controlled with only very minor pincushion distortion present. Shading at the corners hovers around -0.7EV wide open at f/2.8, before settling at around -0.6EV through the rest of the aperture range, with a gentle fall-off from the centre of the frame – something that can be easily rectified in post-processing, and didn’t really detract from the real-world samples we shot.
I found the lens to deliver a decent level of sharpness as well, with our test charts revealing that the sweet spot for the lens was around f/4, with diffraction seeing results soften from f/11 onwards.
