As I suspected previously, Fuji haven't been able to do much about the orbs with firmware. It's a hardware issue after all, so indications are that when you're in EXR mode, the new version (1.03) essentially forces the ISO to higher values in an attempt to keep the orbs under control. Hmmmm - people willing to shell out £400+ for this kind of camera aren't likely to be too impressed by that "solution" methinks.
However - it's still worth loading the new firmware (check out the link from the resources on the right hand side of this blog) because Fuji have made a few other changes, one of which addresses one of my irritations with the camera. Now we have a configurable raw button! Previously, you pressed it before taking a shot, got one raw+JPEG and then the camera reverted to its earlier settings - so if you thought you were still capturing raw shots, you weren't. Now, you can use the button as a toggle switch to keep the camera in JPEG, raw, or raw+JPEG mode until you press it and choose again. Much better, and saves digging into the menu system to find the raw option.
By the way, it's also possible to configure the raw button as an additional fn button instead, if that would be more useful to you. In order to configure the raw button to do this, go into page 3 of the setup menu, and look under "fn" where you can configure both the fn and raw buttons.
Orbs haven't affected me too badly yet, but the firmware hasn't fixed two other bugbears for me:
(1) the histogram in manual mode is of absolutely no use - a big mistake for those who want to take care and enjoy using the M mode to work methodically before pressing the shutter.
(2) you can't adjust exposure compensation when attaching an external flash, which seems just silly to me.
I've yet to experiment to find out whether we still get nasty blown pinky red in JPEG shots under certain energy-saving lighting conditions - but I suspect that issue still remains as Fuji havevn't mentioned it in the information accompanying the firmware release.
