Friday, November 07, 2014

Fujifilm XF1 now cheap too

Fujifilm XF1 is a real pocketcamera, though not brand new. It's very light-weight, and it is quality, check the reviews. It has a manual zoom lens, much easier to control than the electronic ones usually found on compacts. 
And it may be the best looking pocketcamera out there. 
And it's now selling for about $240, which is crazy cheap.  (It's possible the low price indicates a replacement is on the way.)
I got the red/burgundy one, I love that color, but it's also in tan or black. 



It's almost a semi-pro, with all the manual settings you'd expect of such a beast, only in a small body. And it has Fuji's uniquie EXR technology, which can combine neighboring pixels (due to an unusual honeycomb pattern of them) to enhance contrast reach or to improve low-light performance. (This usually has the effect of halving the effective pixels though, to 6MP instead of twelve. I can live with that, one of my most popular series was taken with a 2MP camera.)

If you want maximum power for a pocket camera, I recommend the Sony RX100 Mark 2 (not 3). For one thing, it has a slightly larger sensor and a tiltable screen. But it costs over three times as much! Right now, the XF1 is a great choice for those wanting a good pocketcamera which looks really stylish, and for a really great price.

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Imaging-Resource review.
The XF1 should also score big with casual shooters who not only want to attract oohs and ahhs when they carry it around town, but also want a camera that, on auto pilot, will take well-exposed shots with high dynamic range.
Add up the Fuji XF1's sexy appearance, fast and fun operation, immense customizablity, dynamic image quality and special shooting modes, and you have a solid, if unorthodox, enthusiast-level compact camera. It's one that definitively earns a Dave's Pick.
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4 comments:

David Evans said...

That does look very nice, and the price is tempting. But this review

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/2367736880/roundup-enthusiast-zoom-compact-cameras/6

says that the image quality is not as good as some competitors. Think I'll wait to see what the replacement is like.

Bru said...

There already is a replacement, the Fuji XQ1, which seems to have the same lens, but might have a different sensor. Still looks like a good deal though.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

It is probably a bit better, though only the processing seems to be different.

(BTW, Imaging-Resource made it a Dave's Pick, I'm sure they wouldn't have if there was anything *really* wrong with the images. And the look fine to me.)

But it's $150 more currently, and I think they made a mistake when they changed when I thought was the biggest draw of the XF1: the super-simple aesthetic of the design, including the red and tan color. Black or silver simply don't cut it, for me, simply because 99% of gadgets are black or silver.

William Kazak said...

Amazon has some negative reviews that are worth reading about multiple copies of the camera malfunctioning.