Flysurfer, I thought that David (Soundimageplus) really liked the output of the XP1. Or at least that was my read after a quick skim.
Yep, he really liked his faulty output. Not the camera's fault, mind you.
Here's a OOC Velvia sample I shot last Monday:
It's ISO 800, hence DR 400, so the JPEG features full dynamic range. No blown highlights, nice structure in the shadows.
I can still develop the RAW file in Silkypix, though. Yes, it will be 2 stops underexposed (that's the deal with DR 400), but Silkypix will take care of this automatically and display a rather flat and unattractive file at default values:
So what I did is changing the development parameters in Silkypix more to my liking for this pic:
Then, I exported a 16 Bit TIFF to Aperture, did some selective NR and RAW pre-sharpening with NIK and finally applied my own film gradation (in this case more like Kodak film, oh the blasphemy!) to get a nice and decent RAW workflow result. It's not rocket science, but it takes a few minutes and it helps if you know what you are doing.
Not too shabby, either.
So don't be afraid of DR400/DR200 and ISO800/400. In any case, the camera will still amplify at ISO200, but the RAW will be underexposed (to save the highlights) and needs some recalibration in the shadows and midtones, which most modern RAW converters can handle.
It doesn't matter if you manually underexpose a shot to save the highlights or the camera underexposes it automatically in DR mode. The resulting RAW will be quite the same, the difference may lie in the precision. With experience, you can work more precisely (underexposing to the point, aka ETTR) than the camera with its coarse -1 EV / -2 EV approach. Plus, if you do it manually with DR set to 100, your underexposed JPEGs may be difficult to post process. That's because JPEGs include only 8 bits per color channel, with limited information in the shadows. JPEGs are more or less end products when it comes to gradation, that's why Fuji and most other camera makers offer DR tools to expand the dynamic range for JPEG output. Basically, the camera is doing the grading for you in its internal RAW converter. But you can still do it manually in RAW, as I did with the butterfly.