X100 First Impressions
My X100 arrived yesterday, just before I had to leave for a gathering of friends that happens every Saturday at a café. No time to look at the manual, just set it on aperture priority and began shooting. Over lunch, explored the camera and soon had it set up to my taste and fine-tuned to shooting in the café. Controls are completely straight forward and menus quite comprehensible for anyone experienced with high-end digital cameras. Clearly not a consumer camera, however. Slightly smaller than I had visualized, but still fits the hand nicely. Also fits in an old belt pouch. Hefty enough to hold steady, but of little noticeable weight in the pouch. Perfect carry-everywhere camera.
The retro design fascinated my friends, but once I started shooting, the camera was ignored. Shots of people just being themselves and living their lives with no sign of awareness of the camera—as I had hoped. Adequately fast. I hit the switch with my finger as I pull it from the pouch and it is ready to use by the time it reaches my eye. Focus is not as violently fast as my D700 with a contemporary lens, but fast and positive enough to be no problem. It is locked on well before the image can be composed.
For street shooting using the hyperfocal scale, one can set it on manual, choose an object within the desired range and push a button. It will lock onto the object and hold that distance until you push the button again. While it has a manual focusing ring, this is a far faster way to use manual focus. Of course, it has focus triggered by a half press as well as continuous focus.
It is all about the hybrid viewfinder. Both the Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) and Optical Viewfinder (OVF) can be set to display an enormous selection of information or kept very sparse. When using the OVF, the EVF projects the parallax sensitive frame lines and everything else you choose. While most rangefinders focus down to about a meter, the OVF is good to about 80cm where it runs out of parallax correction. Punch Macro and it switches automatically to the EVF for very close focus. The EVF has a resolution of 1,440,000 dots, and is very usable. It also has the conventional LCD monitor on the back which can be used like any other compact camera. However, a sensor near the viewfinder's eyepiece will switch between the monitor and viewfinder when you put your eye to it. Very nice. The viewfinder has diopter adjustment for individual eyes.
One can switch on a choice of three shutter sounds, or leave the camera nearly silent. You can hear the between-the-lens leaf shutter in a quiet room, but barely. Since it is a leaf shutter, flash will sync all the way to the fastest shutter speeds for fill flash outdoors. I shot available light yesterday at the café, but did play with fill flash afterwards. Works fine. There is also red-eye elimination, which I did not try.
No Adobe Camera RAW yet, so I chose to shoot RAW+JPEG. A RAW conversion program is included in the package, which I have not tried. The consensus on Fuji forums is that it is in the class of that included with Nikons—not quite as bad as a virus, but not great either. In the meantime, there is very comprehensive in-camera RAW conversion function. Any camera settings can be applied after the fact, in any combination. Totally non-destructive of the original exposure, and when shooting RAW+JPEG, the original JPEG is not overwritten. This includes film emulation—the camera will mimic the colours of Provia, Astia and Velvia films as well as B&W with and without red, green or yellow filters.
Speaking of filters, it has a switchable three EV neutral density filter built-in for those who want to shoot yet another cliché slow shutter-speed waterfall, or shoot at wide apertures in strong light.
It is not a D3 for shooting sports, so has a choice of three or five frames per second, with a buffer space for eight RAW or ten JPEGs. It will write faster to a Class 10 card than to a Class 6, so that is what I got. I doubt it writes at the full Class 10 speed, but that was not a problem. It is just not a camera that fosters a machine-gun approach to photography. I don't even use the D700 that way. The X100 practically screams "decisive moment". I used it exclusively on single-shot and that felt natural.
It has a few interesting bracket options beside the usual exposure bracket (up to 3.0EV), including ISO, dynamic range and film simulation brackets. While the camera could be used for HDR, I would probably stick with the D700 for that—a range of 9.0EV. On the same page are panorama and movie modes. In panorama mode, it has in-camera stitching, and it worked very well for the couple I tried. For serious panoramic work, I expect I will stick to the D700, but this could be handy. It has movie capability, which probably will be rarely used by me.
So far no complaints. The camera exudes quality and is very pleasant to use. One accepts the limitation of a built-in 35mm lens—which felt like the perfect choice—and finds an otherwise richly featured camera, ideal for candid, street and decisive moment photography. Unless you are Henri Cartier-Bresson reincarnated, it would probably not be a good choice as an only-camera. However, the D700 and a bunch of lenses is not exactly the most mobile of kits. This fills the gap for a small, but extremely high quality carry-everywhere camera.
I am happy with the price. I paid almost the same for a Nikon Coolpix 8400 back in 2004. It was an excellent camera for its time, but the X100 is vastly superior with its APS-C sensor, rich feature set and EVF with more than six times the resolution. X100 cameras on eBay have been selling for double the price within hours of being posted, and I saw one on Amazon yesterday with an asking price of $4,000US. I paid $1,200Cdn for it, and it feels and performs like it is worth every cent. When I picked it up, the whole sales staff and every customer in the place came over to see the box opened. I can not remember any camera since the D3, generating that kind of interest.
Oh, and as an added touch of elegance, the camera comes in a black box, nestled in black satin.
Everyone in the store seemed quite impressed. After a bit of shooting, I was impressed as well.
