on the X-Trans sensor

Most of the time I read about Fuji’s X-Series cameras and sensors the author swears it’s the best inventions since sliced bread. Jonathan Moore Liles published the article X-Trans: The Promise and the Problem on PetaPixel which offers a rather critical (and hence quite refreshing) view on the X-Trans sensors and processors.

The waxy appearance of faces when using SOOC Jpegs with higher ISO value is nothing to argue about. It’s just there. When shooting people at parties and events I tend to use RAW and trade in the waxy Jpegs for the mediocre raw conversion of the ACR in Lightroom or Photoshop. Which leads to my most biggest annoyance on the X-Series. The colour pixel pattern of the X-Trans sensor makes the interpolation process more complicated and most converters seem to have problems with it. I learned Iridient Developer does a great job on demosaicking. But honestly, I prefer using Lightroom. And I do not want hardware (sorry, cameras are hardware – at least the digital ones) to define my workflow. But even in the latest version of ACR there is still the interpolation problem which gives dense branches and trees in the background a watercolourish kind of look under some circumstances. This may not appear in every images but frequently enough to be a major annoyance.

And unfortunately false colours and Moiré are still present in the Raw file as mentioned in Jonathan Moore Liles‘ article. Take a closer look at the grids in the center of the two images.