kyle wurtz

As much as I love shooting with the X100F, today I want to talk about one of its aspects that’s been bugging me a bit lately: the EVF. It has a lot of positive attributes – it’s much quicker than my X100S’s EVF, for example – but I seem to have troubles judging exposure with it.

To my eye, there seems to be more contrast when looking through the EVF than the resulting image. It doesn’t matter whether I’m comparing to the preview on the LCD screen or the JPEG when loaded onto my computer…or the histogram, for that matter. In all cases it seems like the EVF has significantly more contrast. This is especially noticeable for me in the highlights. If I purely use what I’m seeing in the EVF to judge exposure, I’ll end up pretty significantly underexposing the image. When something looks to be pure white, it often turns out to be only about 80% of the way to pure white on the histogram. This means I end up either pumping up the highlights/whites in post-production or I have to remember to check the overlayed histogram before hitting the shutter. Neither requires a whole lot of effort, but it does slow things down a bit.

I was first notified of this issue by a reader when I was still getting used to the X-T2, and it’s been bothering me ever since. If anyone else has experienced the same phenomenon and/or knows of a fix, please let me know!