Finally got to spend some time today, in nice weather, shooting the way I like to shoot most. A long walk, handheld, no particular place to go, big city (Sydney).
Observations:
I'm getting many more keepers at a given shutter speed than with the D800e. I'd guess about a stop or 1.5 of improvement.
The 90mm lens is great. It's got a little vignetting at widest aperture, and it'll be nice when LR gets lens profiles for that and can map it out. But it's sharp corner to corner and has a good bit of contrast. I'd say it's a little better than my copy of the Zeiss 100/2 and not quite as good as the Zeiss 135/2.
I can't wait for a stabilized macro lens. The 90mm is nice and light (yay for not super-huge aperture), but I'd like a better repro ratio and another stop or two for handheld.
The auto-focus is pretty good. I mostly shoot these static macro-y things, so generally I prefer MF. But with fly-by-wire, it's not nearly as fast to rack the lens as a traditional lens, so AFing to get close is quicker, especially when moving from close-focused to more traditional focus distances. This will only be more annoying on a future macro lens, I'm sure, but it's okay.
I intentionally underexposed 3 stops for a few images, so that I could get the shutter speed up enough to avoid blur. I would say the Sony sensor feels a stop or so more malleable than the one in the D800e.
In contrast, the power management is pretty abysmal. It's not just that it gets warm -- which it does -- but that it just plain sucks the battery dry, even when it goes into its orange light standby mode. I also made the mistake of putting it into my bag for a few minutes while in orange light mode (because it takes so long to start up otherwise), and it was super hot five minutes later when I pulled it out. I would not recommend doing this. The X1d team needs to figure out a way to power down more of the camera while in between shots.
I got about 2 hours out of one battery, and 80 images, with medium/average amounts of review. Since no batteries seem to be available for purchase, and there's no ship estimate, and we know Hasselblad is way slow, that pretty much means you're not using this camera in the field for a serious expedition for some time to come. But then I think how I can go a whole week of shooting on one Nikon battery, and I get wistful all over again.
The MF peaking and auto-ISO range capping are both nice to have. Still need a real, full-featured auto-ISO feature integrated with Av mode, but that'll surely come.
I also received the RRS L bracket. The bracket won't allow the SD card door to open if it's installed close in, but you can extend it and have a big gap (and a wider package) if you want access to the card door while shooting. Although it makes the whole thing a lot wider to do that, it does give you a second place to grab onto the camera when the regular grip gets tiring after a while.
I remain pretty happy with this camera. I think the EVF is fine, the controls are straightforward, and the kit is great for walking around and remaining fairly inconspicuous. I still suspect GFX will be the better camera for me, most of the time, but I have this sneaking feeling that I'm going to end up keeping both! (I always travel with two cameras anyway.)
