Why I didn't move to Fujifilm
I prefer shooting JPEG. I’ll do RAW when I need to — DXO PhotoLab does a good job — but most of the time I can’t be bothered. So colour straight out of camera matters to me, and that’s what started this whole detour.
I’ve been shooting on a Z5 with Picture Control 2 and it’s fine, but I’ve felt its limits. Meanwhile Fujifilm’s reputation for gorgeous straight-out-of-camera JPEGs kept coming up, and the influencer community around film simulation recipes was hard to ignore. Add in the metal body, the mechanical dials, the overall feel of the thing — I learned photography on a fully manual film SLR and Fujifilm clearly understands that shooting experience in a way most modern cameras don’t. I was tempted.
So I borrowed an X-E5 with a couple of lenses for a weekend to find out.
The Film Simulation Problem
My conclusion: the colour isn’t better. It’s different.
The film simulations are good, but they’re designed to look like film — but I don’t care about looking like film. I shot film. I know what it looks like. It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself. What I want is rich colours, interesting light, good composition. The simulations prioritize nostalgia over these things.
The recipe culture compounds this. Setting up a recipe means copying settings parameter by parameter from the internet. They’re fiddly to configure, limited in how much you can adapt them, and awkward to switch between in the field. Whoever decided to put the film simulation dial next to the EVF eye sensor made it a minor ordeal. The Q menu doesn’t help either — flicking between simulations, you can’t easily see the output as you go as you can with Picture Control.
The Nikon Picture Control Answer
To be fair, Picture Control 2 on the Z5 isn’t the answer either. It’s too limited to get the output I want in-camera.
But Nikon let me find the real answer before I spent any money. NX Studio supports Picture Control 3 — the system used in the Z5 II and Z6 III — and you can apply it to RAW files from the Z5. So I took my existing RAWs and processed them through NX Studio with PC3 recipes to see exactly what the newer bodies would produce in-camera.
The results (to my subjective opinion) are better the X-E5 output. Same rich colour, same punch, with better image sharpness from the full frame sensor. Then I found a great deal on a Z6 III. Now I just await delivery.