Hey, quick update. On phone so typos and missing details, happy to fill in later.
I spent all day yesterday walking from shop to shop in London, and on the phone to stores further afield, before I eventually called a large camera rental business.
It left me with a boring choice and feeling conflicted.
The general consensus among the shops was that they have more failures overall with Fuji gear and spend more time dealing with the Fuji rep on returns than Canon or Nikon. This is across the entire range not just the X-T5. Each shop told me to ignore the Fuji website (especially “that picture”) and treat the cameras like they can take a brief bit of rain but carry a cloth with you and when you can take the lens off and dry them. They have more failures on the Fuji bodies than the lenses and almost always it is the main board failing. No doubt though that the X-T5 is a superb camera, super fast and accurate.
According to the shops, the order of things going wrong is Fuji, Canon, then Nikon. The numbers are small, that needs to be said. They also said if a Nikon goes wrong the service department is awful compared to Canon. All three shops said the same thing, no bias. All are well known.
I got to try all three cameras I was looking at. The EVF and seeing the exposure live in the Fuji is fantastic but I was losing confidence in the build, and that biased me.
The Nikon is heavy, the Canon is lovely. The Nikon sensor is amazing though, the recovery if you mess up exposure is immense. The Canon looks better out of camera, I do really like Canon colours. However Nikon is super close now, and at higher ISO the Nikon noise is like grain. Honestly for stills the Nikon wins, and I never shoot video so the Nikon is the obvious choice. Higher resolution, better build, great colours, better noise etc. But my gut is saying Canon, my head is saying Nikon.
I then had a coffee and Googled rental cameras.
When speaking to the rental company they said for reliability in bad weather go Nikon. If it breaks the service will take weeks or months compared to Canons days. But it is very unlikely to fail. They have never had a D850 fail (aside from one dropped from a crane), they’ve had “a few” 5D IVs fail due to “water and weather” but they rent out many more and the camera has been out longer. It’s a close call. On Fuji they rarely rent them out so couldn’t say much.
So I’m now going to look at lenses. I’ll be shooting 24, 35, 50. I rarely go longer and I don’t like zooms. The lenses will choose for me.
On that note the weather sealing on Nikon and Canon lenses real world is apparently very similar, so it’s more down to cost and output for my decision.
Meantime today I’m shooting the Hasselblad with a plastic bag over it. Due to pour down in a few