OP here providing a bit of an update after a few days of use of the camera on the aforementioned trip.
Regarding all of the battery talk, as was pointed out, the IQ+XF system has quite a large battery already (50 watt-hours total.) The idea of Phase improving battery life by improving batteries is fairly absurd—the technology is already pushed to the limits by the entire electronics industry and I’m sure they are already sourcing the best ones they can. A 25% improvement would be unreasonable to expect and would take the 2 hour idle time to 2.5 hours—nothing. The attack must come from the power consumption side.
That said, the battery life that I first reported on hasn’t been a real issue for me so far in field usage for a few days. I carry my camera in a pack for landscape work and now just get used to hitting the power button first when taking it out of my pack and powering it down. Actually using the camera (I.e. live preview, reviewing photos, taking photos, etc.) doesn’t seem to drain battery particularly quickly.
Some other notes after a few more days of usage:
- I *absoutely love* the ability to check focus in both live and review modes. This is a game changer for me. When I use my Phase it is because I am seeking resolution for a large print and with the XF3 there was absoutely no way to tell if you have really nailed focus/vibration until you open the file on your computer. This has already saved several shots for me as I realized, for example, that a 1/10 sec exposure on my 240mm, even in vibration delay mode, was subject to vibration blur that I wouldn’t have been able to detect on my IQ3.
- The speed of operation is great.
- The touch screen is slightly fidgity in terms of where you click, recognizing swipes, etc. No worse than IQ3 (or basically any other non-smartphone touch screen) but this could be improved. Part of the issue is the screen is not a modern full-stack lamination so there is a fair amount of parallax between emissive screen pixels and touch surface and you are often using a camera touch screen from a funny angle.
- Well, this will be no surprise, but camera technique is crucial for exploiting the entire 150MP with shutter speeds < 4*focal length.
- The exposure preview in live mode is awesome. But, it should do something smarter to emulate longer exposures than simply drop the frame rate to equal the shutter speed.
- I did a bit of long-exposure work with and without dark frame creation. No official test, but it seems like if you are only talking exposures of <10 seconds, you can avoid dark frames. I did some much longer exposures (5 min, 15 min) and dark frame creation seemed to reduce hot pixels considerably. I still need to pull the files into C1 to see how well hot pixel NR takes care of all of the issues. I also hesitate to call this a representative test because I was working in unusually dynamic and cold temperature conditions.
And one quirk to talk to Phase about when I get home:
- My 240BR fails to achieve infinity focus when it gets cold! I’ve been out in Wyoming and it’s been seriously cold (-15C). The lens works fine at room temp, but as it starts to cool down focus shifts. To be clear, this is not an AF issue. I can put the lens in MF mode, crank it all the way to the infinity hard stop and still be focusing on the midground! My 35BR actually seems to suffer the same fate, but the DOF at f8 is wide enough that it doesn’t matter (basically, the “infinity” hard stop is more of a hyper-focal distance.) Interestingly my 80mm seemed unaffected.
All in all, very happy to be using this amazing tool and, as I said before, I’m really excited to see where the Phase folks can take it from here.
