I’ve shot for about a month now with the Fuji X100T and I’ve come to really love the Q menu. The ability to customize your settings and get to anything you want with a single click is genius.
Have you noticed the default Q menu kind of sucks. It gives us a bunch of image control tools, like shadow and highlight adjustments that I find to be completely unnecessary. Unless maybe you only shoot JPEG? Which even still, I think it’s much better to shoot RAW and use the in camera RAW conversion software to create your JPEG files rather than creating them on the fly. But that’s just my preference, so I’ve ended up getting rid of most of the default settings and I’ve landed on custom Q menu that works really well for my everyday style of shooting.
ISO – I keep the ISO as my first setting. It’s nice to have at the tip of your fingers, although I’ve also it set to another Fn button as well. I don’t use the Fn buttons much because I always forget what they are set to.
Dynamic Range – I could probably do away with DR in my Q menu, but I still like to adjust it depending on my lighting situations. It’s very useful to have throttling your ISO behind the scenes to preserve highlights in very high contrast situations. It does this even when you’re shooting RAW.
White Balance – A must for obvious reasons.
Silent Mode – I find silent mode is really nice when you’re shooting street stuff and want to sneak a shot off behind some pedestrians without them raising suspicion.
LCD Brightness – Nice for when you’re indoors or outdoors. At night you can turn it down to save battery and you’ll need it on full power if you’re out in the midday sun. Although a true retro photographer would just turn it off an only use the OVF.
Image Quality – I sometimes shoot just RAW. Sometimes RAW+N and sometimes – just N. So having this in the Q menu is nice.
Film Simulation – I’m always flipping this around trying different film stocks. It’s especially nice if you accidently use this camera to shoot video for whatever strange reason, or if you end up shooting a lot in JPEG mode.
Photometery – This is sort of my wild card spot. I almost always keep it on Multi. But I could see changing it to spot or average if I was shooting a grey card or something. If I got a conversion lens I would likely change this setting to toggle between lenses.
ND Filter – Great for outdoor photography or for flash usage.
Shutter Type – You have to have quick access to this. If you want to shoot fast flash sync speeds you need to go MS. But if you want silent shooting you need to use ES.
MF Assist – A nice feature to adjust your focus peak colors and intensity. I’m still playing around with these settings but I’m mostly using WH now.
Self-Timer – A must for slow shutter tripod work or selfies on a tripod.
AF Mode – I don’t play around with this too much, but sometimes I’ll switch things up.
Flash Mode – A must. I also have this set as my top Fn button.
Flash Compensation – Another must have. You pretty much shouldn’t use your flash without adjusting it for the scene.
What I Wish I Could Add To The Q Menu
There are a few things I wish we could get access to in the Q menu.
Drive Mode – I know there is a dedicated button for this at the top, but I think I would rather have it in the menu and use that top button for something else.
Interval Timer Shooting – Another fun toy that’s fun to play with but is buried in menus. I keep forgetting the camera can even do this.
Movie Settings – This doesn’t really count for the Fuji X100T since video was such an after thought. But if this were the X-T1 – maybe it would be very nice to have quicker access to the video controls and set up my Q menu to be more video focused. After all the X-T1 doesn’t have a flash or built in ND filter, so right there you free up three slots. But unfortunately I don’t have the X-T1 yet, so maybe we can add more features to its Q menu, I don’t know – can anyone confirm?
Also, for those curious. Here is how I’ve customized my Fn menu. The only function buttons I really ever seem to use are the flash Fn 1, and macro focus, Fn 2.
I might move my video record button back up to Fn 1 or somewhere out of the way so I don’t accidently click it. Fn 1 was probably still the best place for it.
That’s my Q menu. Is anyone doing anything different? Please share in the comments.
To learn more about how I use the Fuji X100T, check out my full review.
