We’ve got three cameras. One of them is a crop sensor. Will that X-H2 compare with full frame sensors? Let’s take a look. It’s 40 megapixels, the Fujifilm X-H2. It’s a crop sensor. It’s an APS-C sensor. But we’re going to take a look at it comparing it to an R6 and an a7 IV. Why would we do that? Because I think with a 40 megapixel sensor it’s going to give us the same picture quality as you get on the R6 with a 20 megapixel sensor on a full frame. Of course there’s then the Sony which is 33 megapixels. I want to see how this X-H2 is going to match up with those other cameras.
So the X-H2 is about $500 less than the other two cameras in our comparison. So that’s one of the major reasons that people choose an APS-C sensor, is cost. It’s less expensive. The other major reason is usually because they’re smaller and more compact.
Let’s start with some of the major specs of these two cameras. First the Fuji X-H2 is a 40 megapixel crop sensor. The a7 IV is a full frame 33 megapixel sensor. And the R6 is a 20 megapixel full frame sensor. They all have frames per second. They all take pictures. They all shoot in raw. They all do all those kinds of things everyone else has been telling you about in all the other videos that are out there. Right now I want to look at images, compare images and just see exactly how they compare when you shoot with them. So let’s get started. Here we go.
Picture quality test. First, how we set this up. I’ve got a tripod. It’s the tripod and her. I had her hold very still and very much in the same distance through all these images. (We used Delkin CFexpress type B cards.) Each of the cameras has a 50 millimeter lens. The best 50 millimeter lens we can get for that camera series. So the R6 has got the 1.2 from Canon. And of course, the a7 IV has got the 1.2 from Sony, the G master. And then our X-H2 has a 33 millimeter 1.4 from Fuji. So as we put those up and photograph with them there is a slight discrepancy in the size of the heads. Not much, but a slight bit.
But immediately you see something that is very interesting. I see the Canon color. The Canon color, I used to love this color. And it’s just starting to become way too orange to me. Then of course, the Sony is almost a little too clinical for me. It’s just very, very clean. Very clean. Clean, beautiful, straightforward color. I could correct both of these, either the Canon or the Sony, to make it look perfect. But I think actually the Fuji in the middle has the best looking color. And I think it has a very nice looking skin tone.
But look at the background. Immediately we can see the difference between an APS-C sensor and a full frame sensor. At f/1.4, all these are shot at 1.4, you see the background is way more out of focus with the two full-frame sensors versus the Fuji.
So let’s look at sharpness now, because that’s really interesting to me. Is it as sharp? Is it going to compare with that Sony a7 IV, which has you know, 33 megapixels. It’s 40 megapixels in an APS-C sensor. Both the Sony and the Canon are super sharp. We checked all of our images and the Fuji is dead on for Focus, but the detail and the sharpness is just not quite there. It’s very close.
So let’s now go on to another test and just look at this again. Let’s look at the depth of field. Let’s look at the picture quality on her face. This is a little different situation. She’s in the shade and it’s just kind of open shade. Let’s look at those three together one more time. I mean I’m trying not to look at the color. Because the minute I see the color I know what camera it is. I’m trying to just look at focus and not color. Oh yeah, it’s just there. When I look, when I blow up the eyes on these, immediately I can tell the Fuji is not, it doesn’t have quite the quality that the Canon and the Sony have. It just does not quite have it. So, there is a big difference. Part of the reason I think I’m wondering if the Fuji is not hitting the eyeball, but it’s hitting more of the eye area. We were using eye tracking on all of these. It could be that it really, I think it’s just picture quality. It’s just the quality of the image. You’re having to blow it up so much more.
So look at that background. Can you tell the difference in focus in this? Yeah, quite a bit. You can certainly see that the Fuji has a deeper focus. It’s going out of focus a lot more on the Sony and on the Canon. So it becomes very obvious. You can see more depth of field with this Fuji. The Sony and the Canon have a shallower depth of field. I mean, it’s just, it’s very obvious when you see them as they come up next to each other. You can pick out which camera is the Fuji by virtue of focus. It has a little deeper focus.
So let’s take a look at dynamic range. Does a smaller sensor give you less dynamic range? or more? Let’s find out. Here we go. So there’s at normal. Again, I’m seeing the focus difference. If you look at the eyes on each one of these the Fuji is not as sharp as the Canon and as the Sony. The color is certainly the same as what we’ve been looking at. If I look at the white back there in the background they’re all three extremely close.
When I go to plus one this is where things start to fall apart pretty quick. The Canon is blotchy and that white background is just blooming. Sony’s doing the same. The Fuji and the Sony seem a little more similar to me. I think the Canon’s already kind of falling off the chart just a little, pretty quickly.
Now let’s go to plus two. Look at the Canon. It’s lost all the detail in that background, can’t hold it. The plus two on the Fuji is not, I mean, it’s very similar to the Sony. It’s actually holding its own with that Sony. It’s doing an incredible job. Canon on the other hand is really struggling.
When we go to plus three the Canon’s just gone. That R6 is just gone. And boy, the Fuji, I’m getting better detail in this plus three than I am on the Sony. And the color has held much better. I mean, look at the color on her face compared to what’s happened to both the Canon and the Sony. The Canon and Sony have just kind of gotten this yucky, orangey, you know just very posterized looking. Whereas the color has stayed much better on the Fuji. We didn’t go to plus four because already at plus three they look pretty sad.
Let’s go to minus one. Minus one is a great place to shoot. Actually, minus two thirds is kind of where I like to be. But at minus one I’m getting great detail. The Canon is beautiful in that background. We’re seeing beautiful detail throughout all those highlights in the background. Whereas the Fuji and the Sony, they’re struggling a little bit. Canon is going to hold the shadows at minus. Whereas Fuji and Sony are going to hold more on the plus end, it seems like as we’re looking at these.
So let’s go to minus two. Yeah, they’re all, they’re still holding pretty nice. Canon is holding wonderfully. Almost the Sony feels like it’s losing a little bit of detail. You see the focus distance difference too. Look at the Fuji, the sign on the slate is more in focus than the Sony or the Canon. And she’s the same distance behind. So you just see the difference there in that focus.
All right, let’s go to -3. We’re all still pretty clean. I’m seeing great highlights in the background. The highlights, we aren’t losing the highlights. It is interesting to look at the noise in each of these images. And the noise in the Fuji is pretty prevalent. You see it in the shadows. We’re starting to get grain building at that minus three as we try to recover it. And so it’s not holding that quite as well as both the Canon and the Sony are looking much better.
All right, let’s go to minus four. At this point we should be seeing a lot of artifacting. We should see strong kind of digital noise building. Yeah, the Fuji definitely has. It has really a lot of that digital noise that has built. We see a little bit of artifacting and we also see a color shift there. Both the Canon and the Sony have probably held their color. They have held their color better. Whereas the Fuji has kind of lost its color. It’s gotten much more kind of orangish and not holding the color as well. If I looked at this and I had to make, if I had to call it, you know WWE Smackdown, I would say Sony kind of edged maybe a little bit between these other two cameras. But I think Fuji really struggled with regards to digital noise and losing detail. And on the low end certainly the color shifted. But on the high end was very strong. All right so there’s a look at dynamic range. What do you think? Leave us a comment.
Let’s take a look at ISO. Because I think ISO is going to tell us a lot and we’ll see some difference between these three cameras. First off, the lowest ISO for Fuji is 125. And so we shot this first one, 100 ISO for the Sony and the Canon. 125 ISO for Fuji. We see, I mean there’s nothing to see here. Beautiful solid images. There’s no digital noise. I mean everything just looks, it looks wonderful.
So this is 200 ISO. Just, they’re strong. I would feel very comfortable shooting any of these cameras at 200 ISO. I do start to feel like though, if you start, look at the transition between the shadows and the highlights. Well I’m not going to say it’s happening yet. But it’s getting very, very close here. The transitions start getting a little digital noise in the transitions.
If you look at 400 ISO there’s a little bit of digital noise. You start to see it maybe in the bridge of her nose. The Fuji is starting to see, I’m starting to see a little bit of just a slight hint of that digital noise is starting to creep in there at 400.
Let’s take a look at that 800 ISO for each of them. You know what, the Canon is looking pretty clean for a 20 megapixel sensor. The Fuji, I’m starting to see a little bit additional noise at 800 ISO. We’re starting to see some contrast building in the Sony. The Sony is starting to look a little bit contrasty. I think that’s starting to happen as we get to 800 ISO.
At 1600 I’m seeing the digital noise. It’s starting to definitely come in with the Fuji. You see it above her eyelid. I’m getting a little more noise above the Sony. The Sony kind of made a jump here. It looks like it kind of caught up a little bit with each of these. Looking very similar at this point. The Fuji is probably a little more kind of noisy than the other two.
Jump to 3200 ISO. Yeah, look at the Canon. There’s a lot of digital noise in her skin. But boy the Fuji took a big jump here. You really see that digital noise is very prominent. The Sony’s there as well. But it’s not as prominent as the Fuji.
Now we go to 6400 ISO and why would we? You know, although I have shot before. I just shot an owl not too long ago. We had to get up into this range because there’s no light. It wants to fly at night. But the Fuji is much more grainy looking. Digital noise has become very prevalent. The color has shifted more on the Canon than the other two. It has become this kind of yellow, pale yellow kind of color. Whereas we still have a little better skin tone in the Fuji and Sony’s looking okay. They’re all struggling but the Fuji is definitely struggling the most.
Now when we go to 12,800 ISO it’s just digital noise everywhere. You see it in the background. You see it on the faces. Whoa, look at that Fuji. It’s just, it’s very prevalent. It’s starting to just break up. The image is starting to break up at that point, very, very prevalent.
And of course, we only had the two, which is a Canon and the Fuji that went to 25,600 ISO. It looks like pointillism at this point a little bit. So it’s very strong.
So we’re using the Spyder Checkr Photo, which is that small little card, collapsible card case. It’s just easy to get it into the images because it’s small. We used it. We set the color balance according to the gray square and it looked really good. There you have it, the ISO test.
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So now let’s take a look at the autofocus test. I love doing this test. I shoot these on a slower frame rate, frames per second to try to give us a closer count. But really, the Sony is at a disadvantage here because that a7 IV is only going to give us around 10 frames per second. Whereas we’re going to get almost to 20 frames per second with both the Fuji and with the R6, the Canon. But let’s take a look at these and just see how many images we lose.
So let me start off with the Canon. It starts off, she’s coming and it’s very sharp all the way. But when she hits this mid area where she’s starting to come into kind of transitioning from a full body to more waist up we lose several in here. We lose two or three. I think overall on this entire run here we’re losing about five. And those five images, but that’s out of a pretty good count. It’s almost 50 images. So it’s a higher count than we got with either of the other two cameras. So Canon did a really good job. I mean five images out of 50, that’s pretty good.
All right, let’s take a look at the Fuji. So on the Fuji I’m going to get about 36 images here and it starts out very sharp and very in focus. We start to lose some of them kind of towards the middle and also at the end we lost several. We lost between four to six. You look at them yourself and tell me what you think if it was four or six. But we’re losing four to six out of 36. So the auto focus I don’t think is quite working as well as it was on the Canon.
All right, let’s take a look at the autofocus with the Sony as she walks towards the camera. As I’m looking at it it’s holding the focus as she comes in and it’s just it’s really spot on. I think we lose one there. Her eye was closed but for the most part it was with her the entire way. And we probably lost the one where her eye was closed. So wow, if you look at that I’d have to say that Sony was definitely ahead of the others. But none of them are bad when you’re losing 5 out of 50 or you know four or five out of 30. I mean that’s still a really high percentage. I’d like to see a hand focus of her walking that fast and keep that many in focus. There’s no way you can keep that many in focus hand focusing. So the autofocus on each of these cameras is really good. I think the Fuji is edged out just slightly by the Canon and certainly all of them are edged out by the Sony.
So let me boil this down and wrap it up. First off, I do love the color on the Fuji cameras. I just think the color is spectacular. It’s beautiful color. It reminds me a lot of the medium format Hasselblad color. I think it’s just beautiful color and a great place to go with an APS-C sensor. You do lose some image quality but with 40 megapixels this is better than any other APS-C sensor I have ever seen. That’s a real barrier to break when you get to 40 megapixels in an APS-C sensor. So that jumps it up and makes it a much more viable camera at $500 less. Which is one of the reasons people choose APS-C sensors. And the other is size that we talked about. When you look at the size of the lenses you have to put on, you know, and of course this is a 1.2 versus 1.4 and that does make a difference. But you have smaller lenses, smaller form factor and that makes this a much easier camera to travel with and to use just in a lot of different situations. It’s just smaller and more compact. So I hope you enjoyed this review. So keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!
So I’ve been wandering around LA with the HEIPI tripod now for several days. And I have really enjoyed using it. It’s very quick to set up. There’s so many features on it that have been thought through. It is compact. It is lightweight. It’s super simple to use. That inner column becomes a column or a small tripod. And I have really enjoyed using it. It is made to travel. For a lightweight compact tripod I don’t think you can find better than this.
