(Note first that these early impressions don't contain any substantive comment upon the image quality of the 100 mpx back: it's far too early for me to have real impressions of image quality, noise, sharpness, etc. All looks quite good on that front at first glance)
I received the XF-100 and a few lenses last week. Initial impressions:
(1) It looks and feels like a modernized Contax 645. I love the Contax, so for me, this is a good thing.
(2) Build quality is excellent, with a few minor exceptions. It's 99% good news: the body/back feel crafted from a solid hunk of metal, there's no play/looseness in any of the parts, the metal lens hoods are welcome (the plastic hoods with the Leica S lenses are one of my pet peeves), the lenses all feel solid and fall nicely to hand. The build quality exceptions I've noticed thus far are:
(a) the body's battery cover door feels flimsy/like it would break off if you set the camera down with the battery cover unintentionally left open (that may or may not be true: I'm just saying it feels that way because the hing feels pretty loose and fairly thin). I think I've gotten spoiled by the integral latch mechanism of the Leica S.
(b) My batteries are getting stuck in the body. (I'm working with my dealer and Phase on this: it's either that my body or my batteries are slightly out of spec/either the body cavity is slightly too small or the batteries are slightly too large).
(3) Viewfinder: Quite good, but not the very best eye-level viewfinder I've ever used: that distinction belongs to the Leica S. The XF viewfinder is slightly (just slightly) dimmer to my eye than the Leica S, and it's magnification appears to be slightly less (i.e., there's a slight but noticeable tunnel effect such that when looking through the viewfinder, objects appear slightly smaller than they are in real life, whereas the Leica viewfinder is (or at least appears to my eye to be) much more of a 1-to-1 magnification.
(4) Waist-level finder: Works great, all metal. The focusing aid on the handgrip when you switch the layout to "waist-level" is helpful, but I doubt I'll use it much. I'll either rely on the ground glass, the optical pop-up magnifier, or the AF confirm beep.
(5) Autofocus: fairly snappy for a medium format camera. It's at least as fast as the Leica S. Initial impression is that it's marginally better at achieving focus lock more quickly than the Leica S. In terms of accuracy (hitting focus where I intend), it's been reasonably good but not perfect. I am not at all yet sure how much of that is user error: I very much still need to become more adept at how to get the focus point to land optimally and how/when to use the wider AF point versus the smaller spot AF point. I also still need to calibrate all the lenses. All that said, I'd say I'm at 80-90% AF accuracy, depending on lighting conditions. As to manual focus, I do have one complaint, which is that the lenses (unlike the Leica S) do not have full time manual focus override: you have to physically flip the switch from AF to MF.
(6) Start-up time: Not good. I did a count -- not scientific, just "one Mississippi, two Mississippi..." -- last night of how long it took from "power button press" to "ready to shoot", and I got to 7 Mississippis (7 seconds). THat's just way too long. It's about twice as long as my Leica S (which is itself a lot longer than my Nikon D800, which is nearly instantaneous). I assume the long start up time is due in part to the automatic "disk check" and I'm sure I can turn that off (I recall seeing references to it in the manual). But there appears to be something else happening on startup that's eating up precious seconds, something relating to a flashing battery and lens symbol in the viewfinder/on the top handgrip. Again, I haven't read the manual in enough detail to know everything that's happening upon startup and how I can mitigate it, but whatever it is:ready to shoot time from from power off is too slow. As I recall, it is very slightly faster from sleep to ready to shoot, but not much. Phase should work on this.
(7) User interface: Brilliant. Let me explain, though:
One can access a multitude of settings from the back (touch screen or hard keys), the grip (two hard keys and dials) or the touch screen on the top of the grip. For me personally, there's way too much going on via the menu on the back (whether via touch or hard keys). I suppose this may be ameliorated over time as I use it more/dive into the users' manual, so I'll know intellectually and intuitively what settings are where. As a new user though, I just basically randomly push buttons/icons until I get where I want to be. Too complicated. Accessing the settings via the two hard keys on the grip and the wheels and dials is also too fiddly: everything's there, but I have to think about it too much.
The part that's brilliant is having all of your shooting settings accessible via (1) the dials and (2) the touch screen on the top of the grip. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed are all changeable via the three dials that fall to forefinger and thumb, which is great. Everything else you'd use for shooting -- mirror up, drive mode (single, continuous, self-timer, vibration delay, etc), AF mode, exposure comp, metering mode, battery and card status -- are all accessible via a single touch on the relevant icon on the top touch screen. It's hard to explain verbally how intuitive that is for a shooter, but having used it, it's hard to imagine not having it but instead having to dive through the menus on the rear of a camera's screen. Having them there in the position you'd normally be looking at a camera while shooting (i.e., looking down from the top rather than rotating the camera (if hand held) or crouching down (if on a tripod) to see the rear screen) is fabulous.
(Eight) (I had to write out the word eight because the hypertext on this site kept changing the number to a smiley-face with sunglasses!
Ergonomics: excellent. Everything falls naturally to hand, and the shape of the handgrip combined with the rubbery/non-slip covering made it very easy to handhold. This thing is heavy, though! Even with the 80mm or 110mmm attached, both of which are pretty small lenses by medium format standards. I still think Phase should make a vertical grip, but not solely for ergonomic reasons: surprisingly, at least to me, it's very comfortable to hold vertically without a vertical grip (because the left side of the body, which is the side that rests in your left hand when shooting vertically, is flat, meaning you take the vast majority of the weight in your cupped left hand rather than trying to support it via the grip in your right hand). The reason I think Phase should make a vertical grip is because it'll marginally improve ergonomics during long sessions, but also that there's currently no way to separate the AF function of the secondary shutter release (on the front of the body) from the shutter activation function. When held horizontally, I have AF on the thumb button and shutter release only on the shutter release button. The secondary shutter button can't be configured that way. A vertical grip with two buttons (thumb and forefinger) would solve this. Just updating the firmware to allow the secondary shutter release to be configured for shutter release only wouldn't fully solve this, because when held vertically in a way that allows your forefinger to touch the secondary shutter release, your thumb can't reach the thumb button on the body.
(9) Live view: Didn't use it yet. I'm not really a live view shooter, but I suppose I'll check it out eventually.
(10) Bugs/issues: I noticed a few:
(a) Sometimes when initiating image playback, I would get a "no files found" message. It would eventually after a few seconds play the images, so I assume this is just an error due to the fact that it takes a few seconds for them to "load" for review. But still, it freaked me out....
(b) The image review zoom function is useful, but it should be a "spread two fingers to zoom/pinch to contract" rather than a "use your finger to move the zoom slider" functionality. After using iPads and iPhones for so many years, the former is much more intuitive (as it is for millions of people)
(c) The operation of attaching the prism finder or waist-level finder is needlessly fiddly. You have to insert the finder at a very specific angle with the parts clicking down in a very specific order to get it to latch properly. if you're off even slightly, it won't latch at all or will latch on one side (usually the right) but not the other and get stuck on the latched side.
(d) As I mentioned above, they should redesign the XF body's battery door. The one on the back feels sturdier.
(e) Big one: there should be a way to lock a single exposure variable (ISO, shutter speed, aperture, exposure comp.) so that they're not unintentionally changed if you accidentally jostle a dial or touch the setting on one of the touch screens. As it is (at least as far as I can tell after only a couple of days with it and having not exhaustively read the manual), you can lock
all of the wheels and settings, but you can't lock just one (such as ISO). There should be a functionality where you click on the relevant variable (say, aperture) on the top touch screen and it brings up an option to lock just that variable. This seems like an easy one to fix with a firmware update.
(f) The design of the strap insert slots is insane. It literally took me longer to get the straps in the slots (like 20 minutes) than it did to figure out how to set up the basic settings and start shooting. It's hard to explain unless you've seen the camera, but (presumably to maintain the sleek lines) the strap insert slots are flush against the body: Getting the strap through the top slot and out the bottom slot required a bent paperclip and a lot of patience to slowly nudge it through a millimeter at a time. (I realize that others have found solutions that seem to work better --
http://www.ironcreekphotographyblog.com/2015/09/phase-one-xf-peak-design-strap.html -- but really, Phase should redesign the strap insertion points. Or, even better, include a strap that inserts more easily (and of higher quality than the included strap). Granted, once you have the strap inserted, it's done; but still, what about when (not if) I want to change straps? I don't look forward to going through that process again.
If anyone has specific questions, happy to try to answer. At some point, I'll do a substantive image quality review and comparisons with the Leica S 007.
