The very first thing I seen in regards to the Fujifilm X Half is simply how small and lightweight it’s. The digital camera is designed to provide you no excuses — you must be capable of carry it with you all over the place. And after spending just a few hours strolling round LA with the digital camera, I’m beginning to perceive why you’d need to.
Fujifilm’s newest doesn’t essentially impress on paper. The X Half is an $850 digital camera with a vertically oriented 1-inch sensor able to taking 18MP photographs. There’s no electrical or hybrid viewfinder, no stabilization, no sizzling shoe, and it could’t even take RAW photographs. It’s very straightforward to have a look at that record of lacking options and disrespect the digital camera altogether.
However the X Half’s simplicity may be very a lot the purpose. It is a digital camera for taking scrappy, fast photographs and capturing reminiscences. Plenty of its flaws are masked with movie simulations, filters, and superimposed grain. Its limitations are a characteristic, not a bug.
The digital camera comes with a hard and fast 32mm equal f/2.8 lens. Even with all of the added grain and filters turned off, I discovered it to carry out very nicely. The dynamic vary is appropriate with pure spotlight falloff, edges are sharp, and there’s even some bokeh when you plan accordingly. However I didn’t need to take these sorts of photographs with this digital camera.
Fujifilm loaded the X Half with a lot of its hottest movie simulations, which mimic the look of basic movies, and it additionally added a bunch of latest filters. There’s halation, mirror mode (throwback to Apple’s Photograph Sales space, anybody?), selective colour, dynamic tone, fish eye, and a lot extra. A few of these are downright foolish, however some are endearing and kooky. My favourite was the sunshine leak. It provides gentle leaks to your photographs in a random vogue, so that you by no means know what you’ll get till after you shoot.
On the highest of the digital camera is one thing distinctive: a digital “movie advance” lever. Cranking the lever is integral to 2 of the digital camera’s new options, 2-in-1 diptychs and movie mode.
Diptychs allow you to merge two photos facet by facet. This characteristic makes a complete lot extra sense in a movie digital camera, however Fujifilm is making an attempt to duplicate the concept for a digital world. You begin a diptych by cranking the lever such as you would on a movie digital camera. (Though not like a movie digital camera, a digital digital camera may also report a video, so that may now be a part of your diptych, too.)
Then there’s movie mode, which is designed to extra intently mimic an analog digital camera. It principally locks you out of utilizing trendy options and transferring too rapidly. There’s no strategy to preview your shot on the primary display screen, you’re pressured to crank the lever to advance your imaginary movie earlier than taking the following picture, you’re locked into a selected look till you’ve completed your “roll,” and there’s no strategy to play again the photographs you’ve simply taken both. It’s simply my favourite mode right here as a result of it strips a lot of what we’re used to with digital cameras and makes us use this digital camera solely in a different way.
This mode completely encapsulates why I don’t thoughts the exclusion of an electrical viewfinder. Utilizing the optical one on this mode makes you guess your composition and your framing, and also you merely gained’t know the outcomes till you’re accomplished together with your complete roll. When you’re accomplished, the digital roll “rewinds” and you may take a look at your photographs within the app. Sadly the app isn’t finalized and wasn’t obtainable throughout my demo, however the recordsdata are nonetheless saved on the SD card.
The one speedy unfavorable, no pun meant, I’ve seen to date is that the digital camera simply feels a bit sluggish. Regardless of utilizing a reasonably quick SD card, write speeds appeared sluggish and took me out of the second various occasions. Making a diptych with a photograph and a video took a very long time to save lots of onto the SD. It additionally slowed me down when utilizing Movie mode, the place it’s important to “advance the movie” after every shot. I discovered myself having to attend for the earlier picture to save lots of earlier than cranking the lever.
Even the primary touchscreen, which is essentially the way you work together with this digital camera, wasn’t as responsive as I’d need it to be. There are two screens on the again — a pill-shaped display screen that allows you to select movie sims and navigate menus, and a vertical display screen for altering settings and previewing photos. Some inputs weren’t registering even after just a few makes an attempt, and I wasn’t the one one on the digital camera occasion with the identical concern.
Regardless of these points, I completely loved my transient time with the digital camera and was regularly delighted by the intelligent concepts the Fujifilm crew carried out right here. I hope to see extra firms making daring selections with {hardware} and software program like this that alter the expertise of utilizing the digital camera.
There are way more succesful cameras at an identical value level. However when you’re searching for one thing refreshing and joyful, the X Half is shaping as much as be an excellent little digital camera.