When the working day was over, I—and just about every shooter I knew—did not want to be without a camera, but did not want to spend our own time hauling heavy equipment. While we may have used SLRs for much of our work, we were comfortable with RF cameras as well. The compact RF generally had a wide-normal lens and built-in metering—in all, a fully self-contained camera.
The first I carried was a Kodak Retina. Clam-shell door when closed made for a pocketable package. It was eventually replaced by the splendid Konica S3. With its f/1.8 35mm lens, it handled reasonably low levels of light with considerable ease. The sensor was in the lens-mount, so when a filter was mounted, it read light through the filter. Optics were excellent, and loads of shots with it were published. In fact, it was so good that when we went our separate ways, my ex-—a writer—claimed it in the settlement. Eventually, I picked up a Nikon L35, fully automatic, which I still have.
I very much enjoyed these cameras, and when digital came along kept looking for the equivalent. I did use the thousand dollar bridge cameras during the first few years of digital, but with 2/3" sensor and slow lenses, they were greatly limiting for low light. The Nikon Coolpix 8400 has great optics and features, but ISO200 was noisy and ISO400 strictly for emergencies. By 2006, they had been discontinued, so the only route to the quality I wanted was dSLR. I sacrificed compactness and stealth for image quality.
In 2010, while reading coverage from Photokina, I saw the camera I had been waiting for in the past decade. Fuji was going to build my Konica! I ordered as soon as my dealer could take the order. A 9.0 earthquake happened just after my camera was manufactured. It had shipped from Sendai, but got lost in a container in the Tokyo airport. A month later it was found and finally made it to Canada. It was then delayed again, as Fuji Canada people opened each box, tested each camera and inserted a French language manual along with the English. I heard of no defective cameras being delivered in Canada.
Picking it up finally, I found immediate comfort. Almost identical in size and weight to the Konica, loved the optical finder, loved the silent leaf-shutter that allowed me to sync flash in the harshest sunlight. I was perfectly satisfied, and immediately began getting the people shots that I could not with the big noisy D700. Had Fuji rested on their laurels, I would have been content, but over the years, there were significant firmware upgrades that made an already great camera even greater.
When the weather calls for a jacket, it is in my pocket. In warm weather, I have a small waist pouch for it. Like the 35mm compacts, any time I have absolutely nothing in mind to shoot, it is with me. Unlike the 35mm compacts, I often carry it with my D700 or X-Pro1, primarily for the flash. It will sync at full power to 1/2000th of a second, the flash tube is as close to the lens as physically possible, so there is rarely a discernable secondary shadow. Once the ratio is set, I find that I can totally trust it to deliver the results I visualize. In every way, it is a 2010 version of my beloved Konica S3.
... And anyone else who has or does enjoy a 35mm compact. I have just published this to my blog and I am looking for people to take part. 
