Sebastian Toth | Blog

A Brief Review Of The Fuji X-Pro1

Since a while now, I’m the proud owner of the new Fuji X-Pro1 and the Fujinon 35mm f/1.4 prime lens. It was more or less a jump into the cold water, since i haven’t tried it out before, didn’t wait for the first reviews to uncover the little quirks and faults of the camera. I just saw it the first time and just thought i want it. From the first look of it Fuji seemed to have built a camera which could meet all my expectations. Classic, non obtrusive design. Clean, intuitive and straight forward controls. All that paired with an stunning image quality and easy handling. Thats what i was expecting. And thats pretty much what i got with the Fuji. Now a lot of people have asked me about my opinion and how i thought the camera handles in various shooting situations, so i went out on the street and shot a few frames to get an idea of how the camera behaves and how it is to shoot the new X-Pro1.

Using mainly various analog cameras I have tried out a lot of todays digital cameras too, but somehow never really got happy with one them. Either they where too big and clumsy, there where features missing i deemed essential or they where simply awkward to use. So i sticked with my classic rangefinder cameras, simply because they offered me everything i wanted, and only what i wanted. They where not distracting me with buttons, features, and other stuff i didn’t needed, they made shooting pictures intuitive and let me in control. The most modern film camera i used extensively next to my Leica M rangefinders was the Konica Hexar AF, an autofocus viewfinder camera with a fixed, fast 35mm lens. And there is the point of the whole thing. Im really glad i could use that specific camera, otherwise i wouldn’t have been able to write a review like i now am. It made comparing the Fuji to another camera much easier, but more on that later.

Many people claim the Fuji to be the Leica killer. Well, i owned the M8, and used the M9 for a bit (which in fact is only marginally different from the M8) and i can say that the Fuji is a whole different kind of camera. Many people get fooled by the Fuji’s classic design, thinking its a rangefinder camera and comparing them to Leica’s, but well, its not a rangefinder camera, so there is no real reason to compare it a Leica M. Shooting those cameras are a whole different story where you have a different handling and different things to be aware of. The Fuji is in fact an autofocus viewfinder camera, and thats how it should be treated. 

Shooting the Fuji is a bit of a different story than shooting an M. The Leica M is the epitome of a classic camera. Only the most needed controls, manual focus, nothing that helps you taking the pictures you are about to take. The photographer is the one and only person to blame when something goes wrong. The camera does nothing except exposing the shot. The Fuji on the other hand is packed with electronics, autofocus, automatic metering, shutter priority, aperture priority, two different finders for different uses and another ton of features you will probably never need. So its a real hard thing to compare those two cameras. There is no doubt the Leica is the perfect camera for the purist, for the photographer who wants to stay in control. There won’t be a way around an M. The X-Pro1 can be just like a Leica, but it can be much more than that too. Its probably the camera a modern Leica should be, but most Leica photographers don’t want it to be.

The Camera And The Lens

Unpacking the camera was a joy and i had to think of Apple’s products in terms of packing. Everything looked very exclusive and “premium”. The second you open the box you see that you have bought something thats not meant for the common point-and-shoot camera user or the Amateur-DSLR user. Its not a camera for everyone, and you need to be aware of that. Everything feels very solid, still you will have a shocking moment about how light the camera actually is if you already held a Leica before. Top and bottom plate are made of some kind of metal-alloy thingie and feel very robust and durable, but still the camera turns out to be only 400g heavy. Thats very light for a camera with these specs. The lens appears to be of the same material, also feeling solid and well built. F-Stops are nicely engraved into the aperture ring, the focus ring has a nice grip to it too. First thing i personally noticed and hated was the 1/3 klick F-Stops on the aperture ring. Coming from Leica lenses i was used to half stops or even full stops on older lenses, since it made it a lot easier to count the stops while turning the ring without looking. Now the 1/3 stops make that a bit of an awkward thing, but people who already used Zeiss lenses will know that already and people who where not so used to half-stop clicks or even lenses with aperture rings won’t even notice it i guess.

On the camera body the controls feel very solid. Buttons are arranged well across the back where you can reach them easily with one of your fingers. Mostly its the thumb of your right hand you use to operate nearly every button and dial on the camera body. A thing i don’t really like and noticed pretty early too is that the shutter speed dial can sometime be tricky to operate. The dial is located at a position where the camera body has a little recess, and the dial itself is not very high, so those two things combined make the actually surface of the dial you can reach with your fingers pretty small, and if you have to set shutter speed quickly you will most likely slip of and end up either turning it too far or not at all. You will need to change the grip not he camera and use two fingers to set the dial. However, turning it to faster speeds somehow works better with your thumb than turning it the other direction to slower speed. Thats another thing i personally dislike, but yet again, some people might not even notice that, and most photographers will leave it on A or a pre-set shutter speed anyway. Exposure compensating dial has nice stiff klick stops too so you won’t be accidentally turn it unlike not he X100. Also the On/Off switch is rather stiff to set, unlike on the M8 where you could easily knock the lever to the self timer or off position, especially if you carried the camera under your arm or in a bag. A lot of times i ended up with a turned on camera inside my bag or even the camera set to self timer just because i accidentally touched the lever. That won’t happen with the X-Pro1.

Another thing i noticed is that the thumb wheel on the back of the camera is very very veeeery sensitive, so if you scroll through your pictures you have taken you will most likely to skip past it like every time you try to scroll trough it. Since the wheel is also used to set settings in the quick menu i ended up setting ISO 3200 instead of 800 quite a lot of times already. Its annoying, but i think thats nothing you can’t get used too but still can screw up settings if you are in a hurry or can’t double check what you just set.

Dials on the lens on the other hand have a very nice feel to them. Not too stiff, but not too smooth either. I’d say a Summicorn lens has a much smoother focus ring, but the Fuji’s isn’t really that bad either. At least its much better than any Canon, Nikon or whatever other brand lens i got to use.

Lens quality is impressive. Even at f/1.4 you get extremely sharp pictures, with rich details an no sign of softness or blur. The corners tend to be a bit soft, but that goes away with f/2.8-f/4 and higher. All in all the lens is very usable wide-open and is a joy to shoot at that aperture. Bokeh on the other hand is quite weird. Its not as nice as i imagined it to be, but its not as ugly as the one from a lets say Canon 50/1.4. Its a bit harsh and noisy when there are a lot of spot lights, but in a even light scene it looks pretty smooth. Purple fringes are a problem at open apertures, but they tend to go away at f/4 or f/5.6. Otherwise i haven’t noticed any distortion or weird problems with the lens.

Focusing

Most photographers i know use an M Leica with zone focusing. You simply set an aperture and look at the depth-of-field scale to set your focus at a distance where the subject you will be shooting will most likely appear. Since i know a lot of street shooters, for many of them thats the way to shoot. It lets you shoot blazingly fast, since you only have to look through the viewfinder, compose the shot and press the shutter release. No need to focus since the subject will turn out sharp if you are at least mediocre at guessing distances. You can be even faster by just guesstaming the framing of the picture, which gets a whole lot easier if you use a wide angle lens. Now, since the Fuji doesn’t have a physically printed depth-of-field scale on the lens the whole thing gets a lot more complicated. Yes, you can enable a distance scale in the viewfinder where the depth of field is also displayed in a blueish colored overlay, but if you already have to take your camera to your eye and look at the distance scale and start to turn around the focus ring you might as well just press the shutter release and let the autofocus do the job. So that makes one additional task more that has to be done before you are able to take the picture, making you somewhat slower while taking it. You can of course set the camera to manual focus, but well, lets say its not the optimal way to go. There are two reasons for it. First of all, i somehow can’t believe the depth-scale shown in the finder. I made a little experiment and checked that out since it seemed completely wrong in the first place. The little white indicator for the depth suggested that at f/8 and 3m focusing distance my depth of field would be around 20-30 cm at max. Now that can’t be true since according to my very experience( and i have to confess i double checked with a calculator) it should be more like 2,5m. Also, according to the calculator focussing on 8m should render everything from 4m to oo in more or less sharp focus, whereas the X-pro1 suggests that it would be from like only 6m-10m. So trying to work with hyper-focal focusing won’t work out since you have no idea on how much depth you actually got. I don’t know if thats a bug in the firmware or something, but it definitely shows wrong values. Another thing why manual focus doesn’t work that good in real life use is because the focusing movement of the lens’ ring is done electronically, and apparently there is some minor lag between turning the ring and seeing the focus change in the viewfinder. If i’d had to guess i’d say its less then half a second, but still. You will notice it. You turn the ring, and THEN the focus snaps in place. Also it drags a little behind. If you turn the ring for lets say half a turn or more, then you will notice that the lens is still focusing in the viewfinder after you already stopped to turn the ring. Now i don’t know if thats lag between the lens and body, or just electronic viewfinder refresh rate lag. Anyway, its there and its rather annoying to be honest. BUT ! In my opinion manual focusing still works astoundingly well. At least if your subject isn’t moving too much and you have the time to focus carefully. Then it works pretty well with the screen loupe and you are able to focus precisely and rather quickly too. Also, i think that using a manual lens i.e a Leica lens with and adaptor (which i sadly don’t own yet) you might eliminate the focussing lag. Also you will cancel out another thing i disliked about the lens, namely the fact that the focus ring has no physical stop, so you can turn the ring around like 5 times to reach the other end of the focusing scale. On a manual lens you have those physical stops, and you have a much much shorter turning distance and that lets me believe that manual focus could be pretty ace with a manual lens. The Fujinon lens is, well, subpar for that simply because it looks like a manual lens, but its not.

There is however a little trick how you can make MF a bit faster. If you switch the camera to manual focus, you can press the AE-L/AF-L button to make the camera focus once at where you point it at, and then fine tune the focus using the ring. It saves you some time and definitely saves you from turning the focussing ring too much. I tried it a bit, and its a great way to shoot, but if you want to go full manual its still some kind of compromise.
 

Manual focus isn’t what the X-Pro1 is made for, but nothing that can’t be done either. Its still an autofocus viewfinder camera, so you might want to use it the way it was intended to be used. Manual focus is more like a little gimmick and thing to occasionally use if you get into a situation where you need it like focusing through fences, on reflections or something autofocus might not hit.

But what about the autofocus. A lot of people say its slow, even cited it unusable or whatever bad term came to their minds. 

Well, and now this is where the Hexar AF comes into play. Some photographers consider the Hexar AF to be one of the finest street photography cameras ever. It autofocus isn’t lightning fast like the one on the top priced super pro DSLR’s, but its fast enough for every day shooting on the streets. In fact, i have never missed a shot with the Hexar, nor have i missed on with the X-Pro1 yet. I’d say focussing speed is pretty much just as fast on both cameras. On both cameras is take just about half a second till the shutter fires.

One thing i have to note is that the Hexar uses an infra-red autofocus system, which is bases on distance to the object. So it pretty much doesn’t matter where you point it at, the AF will hit it. The Fuji’s AF system is based on contrast detection, so focusing on a white wall or in total darkness might not be the wisest thing to do. Its much like a rangefinder camera, where its always easier to focus on some bright/dark differences, lines or patterns in the picture. The same applies for the Fuji, so i found it rather easy to adopt to its AF system. If you aim it at contrast edges or patterns, the AF will hit much faster and more reliable then if you point it at blank surfaces.

So all in all, focusing speed is pretty decent and the camera does it very accurately if you just know where to point it at. As a common saying points out the error is most likely behind the camera. Learn to use it and it won’t disappoint you. The Fuji is definitely no camera you just unpack and start shooting brilliant pictures with. You will need to learn to use it.

What i have to point out regarding AF is that the factory settings of the camera are absolutely horrible in that regard. It took me like half an hour to figure out how to make the camera really usable. My first few shots where quite a mess, since AF didn’t hit where i wanted. But i didn’t let it get me down and i searched the menu for something to fix that. Well i found it. As you might know there is parallax error with viewfinder cameras since the lens and finder aren’t on the same axis. Now that applies quite heavily on close distance. Now the problem is that the Fuji has parallax correction, but it only corrects after you depressed the shutter button to the first stop and the camera finished focussing. Now if you use factory settings you have no idea where the AF is actually pointing at on close distance before you focus. However, there is a menu setting called “AF-Correction Frame”. At default this is disabled, and i seriously have no idea why Fuji did this. By enabling it you get a second, dashed AF frame. Now that frame indicates the AF point at closest focusing distance (50cm). With that frame enabled you get quite the idea of where to point the camera according to the focusing distance. Its not 100% accurate, but still much much better than no correction frame at all. Now that helped me a lot and it improved focussing on short distances a greatly. Its a setting you really have to make, otherwise you will miss a lot of shots. Still, its not foolproof, so there is some getting-used-to time involved, but you will find it out pretty quickly where to aim at which distances. Its basically just a diagonal shift of the focusing frame towards the bottom right corner, the dashed frame being the closest focussing distance and the solid frame being the infinity.

Also there is a little thing i noticed which I’m not sure if its a bug or a feature. If you just press down the shutter release in one go you can achieve much faster focussing speed. The camera apparently has a focus-confirm priority, which means it only takes the picture when the camera confirmed focus. Now if you don’t wait for it to show it to you in the finder and then still lose more time reacting and pressing the shutter down completely, you can just aim, and press the button down in one go. The camera will focus and take the picture. Doing this leaves you without the chance to check if the camera really focussed well, but it gives you a little extra time when it has to go real fast. Also, i noticed that the camera compensates for moving object if you shoot that way. I tried it with moving cars, and the focus followed them leaving the object i focused always in focus even if the car traveled in the meantime. As i say, no idea if thats an intend feature since i couldn’t find any info on it, but i hope they don’t change it since thats how i take like 70% of the pictures now. I think its the way to go to shoot the camera efficiently.

 

The Finder

The Finder is another thing that surprised me the first time looked through it. First it game a negative impression, but after turning it on it was like there was “Awesome” written all over it. Coming form a Leica you will notice that the finder is somewhat small. Roughly half the size in surface than the one of a lets say M6. There also lots of film SLR’s which have bigger finders. But thats just until you turn it on. Framelines are bright with a nice feature that they change brightness depending on scene brightness, so you will always see bright but not annoyingly bright frame lines. You will probably need to spend some time in the menu again since you can fully customize the optical viewfinder and the electronic viewfinder separately. If you leave it on factory default its pretty cluttered in my opinion, with spirit level, tons of icons for every setting you can possibly make, histogram and whatever else there is. So i jumped to the menu, disabled half the things to only show me framelines, AF frame, shutter speed, aperture and the light meter scale on the left hand side of the finder. After a few minutes of use you get used to the finder and start loving it. It might be small, but its super clear and its a joy too look trough it. Also there is a button on the back of the camera (“Disp”) which lets you display additional information in the finder at the push of a button, fully customizable of course. For me thats pictures left on the card, battery life, metering mode and the focus distance scale. You can avoid having a cluttered viewfinder, but can get additional information at the push of a button. Big plus point there. 

The electronic finder is something one has to get used to too. I don’t like it that much, but i’ve never been a fan of electronic finders. Somehow its a bit slow for my taste. It doesn’t give you a really fluid and smooth picture, lagging around a bit when you move the camera. It can be pretty annoying since you can’t see anything in the finder except blur if you move the camera around quickly, so i don’t think its any good for general shooting. On the other hand it has some advantages too. First super cool thing the EVF can do is to act like a night vision. I tried it out in a near pitch dark room, where i could neither see anything through the OVF nor through the finder of any of my other cameras, but flicking the switch on the front of the camera to switch to EVF gave me the awesome sensation. The finder really acted like a night vision, making the scene super bright without any sign of noise or artifacts on the electronic screen. So whenever it is too dim to focus or even see anything you can just switch to the EVF and still keep shooting like in bright sunshine. Especially useful when AF fails on you in darkness and you have to focus manually. Another thing the EVF is good for is accurate framing. The electronic finder shows you exactly the picture you will take later, letting you compose a shot with high accuracy. A thing you can’t say from the optical framelines which are mediocre at best. Im guessing the framelines in the OVF are like only 90% accurate. You get more on the picture than you would expect from the framelines, which is actually not that bad since you can always crop away stuff. Its better than missing out something, but still something i wasn’t expecting from a high priced camera like this, especially since the framelines are digitally projected into the finder and can be changed by software easily.

Others Things To Point Out

Well, i won’t go much into technical things since there a like a million reviews already out there which cover all that, so ill just stick to my personal observations. All that i can say is that image quality is, well, i haven’t had a camera delivering such rich colors and so sharp images before. For me, the digital Leica’s where the holy grail in digital images. Super sharp lenses, very good color rendition and very natural looking images. Well, the Fuji tops that. I shot all my pictures in Jpg’s because of the lack of a decent raw convert, shooting in the “Soft” jpg mode. I guess shooting RAW would give even more dynamic range and control, but for now i can’t say anything against not shooting jpg. Now “Sorf” doesn’t mean soft images, it means soft colors. According to Fuji its supposed to resemble the famous Astia slide film, which i personally loved to use in my Rolleiflex. That film just gave extremely natural colors and great skin tones. Now i think Fuji does pretty well with that, although i think that it saturates green a bit too much, no matter what mode you use. In the Velvia mode its pretty obvious that green gets saturated a lot, but also in other color modes where the colors are supposed to be, well, more natural, green is always a bit over saturated in my opinion. That might be caused by the sensor layout of the the Fuji X-Trans sensor featuring more green pixels that normal sensors, so its somehow obvious that green gets a little more “attention” than other colors. But who knows. So yeh well, image quality is absolutely stunning and excellent. It beats the 5D MkII hands down. The Canon is nowhere near as good as the Fuji, so i’d say it really keeps the claim that its better than most current cameras. Also, high ISO quality is astonishing. I shot a lot of pictures at 1600 where i couldn’t tell if that was 1600 or not without looking at the Exif data. I was used to not getting over 640 on my M8 since files got pretty nasty and unusable at high ISO’s, now what i get from the X-Pro1 just blows my socks off. ISO 6400 is pretty much comparable with ISO 640 on the M8 in terms of noise, where i have to point out that even on disabled noise reduction settings the Fuji shows absolutely no color grain at all. It really looks like film grain. The is no color cast and now weird color noise in dark areas at all. Noise looks are completely natural. Haven’t seen that on a camera yet. Also, the amount of detail preserved at high ISO settings is amazing. Even on the highest setting, which is mind-boggling 25.600, the only thing that really bothers is color leaking. Bright colors appear a bit dull, and tend to cast a light halo around them which well, leaks into other colors letting it look a little soft and weird. Like it has some sort of color glow. But thats not really disturbing to be honest and is much less of an issue than it sounds. You’ll get much better files at high ISO than you would expect.

Another thing i noticed are start up times. They seem to be pretty random. There is a menu setting called fast startup, but apparently it does absolutely nothing, since in my observation it doesn’t change anything on camera startup time. I also noticed that if you let the camera off for a while it takes longer to power up. I know it sounds weird, but if you flick the switch to off and back to on a few seconds later the camera will power up much more quickly then if you let it dangle around your neck a bit. But don’t get me wrong, even the longest startup time from flicking the switch to to taking a picture didn’t exceed a second by much. So its pretty quick in my opinion. I already saw slower cameras. 

What also has to be pointed out is that the battery capacity is more than poor. I have to say i used the camera with power-save mode off, since its boosts focussing speed a little, but still. Being constantly on it got me around 150-200 pictures in about 4-5 hours with a full charge. That, well, poor. Even the digital Leica’s which have the reputation of having poor battery life are better than that, so if you plan to carry around the Fuji on longer trips either turn it off risking missing a shot, or at least carry 3 more battery with you. You will need them. Fuji claims that using the OVF only in power save mode should get you around 1000 frames and with power save off still around 400, but i can’t understand how they actually get to that claim.

Comparing It To An SLR

Some of you might ask yourself why on earth take a camera like this, when you can have  a DSLR. Well, it has numerous reasons to choose a viewfinder camera over an SLR, but also there are some disadvantages to it. First of all DSLR’s tend to be chunky and not really compact cameras. They also tend to be heavy. Most of the size is used up by the mirror those cameras need. The Fuji is a mirrorless camera, making it much sleeker and thinner than an SLR. Also its really lightweight. You can lug it around the whole day on your shoulder or around your neck and you will barely feel it dangling around there. Also its much more stealthy, perfect for the street, reportage or delicate shooting. A big disadvantage is probably that the optical viewfinder is very limited with focal lengths. Yes, there is a correction lens to enable a wider field of view with the optical viewfinder too, but that doesn’t go much beyond i’d say 24mm, so having a super wide lens would probably either leave you with an attachment finder, the electronic finder or well, a cropped frame in the finder. Also the same applies for longer focal ranges. Too much above 75mm would turn the framelines so small that accurate composition of a picture would get really painful, leaving you once again with the not so awesome but definitely not unusable electronic finder. Or with an attachment finder .. Although Fuji announced Zoom lenses and even telephoto lenses for the X-Pro1 too, i don’t really think they will be halfway as useable as prime lenses with short fixed focal length.
 

That leaves the camera in a field where one would shoot fast prime lenses instead of zooms and standard focal ranges like lets say 28-35-50 or even 21-35-50  instead of telephoto lenses. The camera is definitely not the best choice for photographers who mostly shoot longer lenses, but is a great camera who always load to build their gear around the famous 35mm.

Conclusion

Well, even if it looks like there is lot of stuff i don’t like on the camera, what i wrote is pretty much everything i don’t like about it to begin with. Every other aspect is great. I find it very enjoyable to shoot with the X-Pro1 and i love to carry it around. Just like i enjoy lugging around my Hexar AF. In conclusion the Fuji is more like a digital equivalent to the Hexar, not to an Rangefinder, so i guess everyone who knew the Hexar and used it will be super happy with the Fuji. For M shooters its still a compromise. Anyhow, its a great piece of equipment, and i can’t wait to get my hands on some neat wide angle lenses for the camera. I don’t regret getting one and i can recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to shoot horse races, the MotoGP or anything else that involves super fast moving stuff. Then you are most likely better of with a  Pro-DSLR. For photographers who want a small, lightweight camera which still gives insane image quality to carry around the city or on trips to the countryside, this is an great camera. For everyone who likes to shoot street, portraits and the occasional landscape or cityscape its in my opinion the perfect camera. Another Plus is that you will most likely to be able to carry it into places where no “Professional” cameras are allowed. I walked into concerts and stuff with my M6 before where people with amateur DSLR’S got rejected, so i think that will work out with this one just fine too. It just doenst look that Pro, which is nice especially for people photography, since not he street you won’t look like you’re wielding a big chunk of evil camera but more a little sophisticated camera no one will really pay attention too. Great for portraiture work too, since people tend to get less scared of cameras like thus. Anyways, it just works for me, and I’m pretty sure it will work for most people who care to understand and appreciate the camera too.

Update:

Fuji just released a new firmware update (v1.01) addressing the shutter clicking issue (which could be disabled already by changing the power save settings), but this of course is a more convenient way to silence the camera. Also it added the missing parallax correction for manual focus. You still need to half-depress the shutter button for the correction to kick in, and when you do so you can’t keep on focussing manually which really is a pain in the ass, but its a step in the right direction. At least now you can accurately frame the picture after you focused. Another thing i noticed is that the screen in EVF and on the back got a bit faster. Now this may be only subjective observation since there is no hint on it in the change log, but who knows what Fuji did. Bad thing is that the Update reset all the camera settings factory default, leaving me with some 10 minutes in the menu again to find everything. You can get the Update here:

http://www.fujifilm.com/support/digital_cameras/software/firmware/x/xpro1/index.html

Very important ! There are two firmware updates to do. If you follow the link above you will get the one for the Body. However there is a separate Update for the lenses too, so head to this link and do those updates too. Its smart to do both updates at once, since both will completely reset the camera again. Very annoying.

http://www.fujifilm.com/support/digital_cameras/software/#firmware

Anyways, I’m very happy that Fuji reacts so quickly, now i hope they fix the quirky DOF scale too ..