I’ve always been very intrigued by the X100 series. First of all because the cameras look beautiful and I’m shallow like that. Admittedly, they also carry the haptic design philosophy that is behind the entire line of Fujifilm X cameras and which I’m quite fond of. Also, the X100s offer an image quality that is really impressive for such a compact system, thanks to their X-Trans sensors and f2 lens.
Unfortunately, up until recently, the cost of entry had prevented me from joining the cool kids photo club. However, upon one of my endless browsing session I discovered that in 2019, earlier versions of the X100 can be found for a reasonable amount of money.
So yes, I’ve had the Fujifilm X100S for a couple of weeks now. I’ve been using it as a companion during my free time and I have to say the experience is rather positive.
As mentioned before, the image quality is great for such a small system. The X100S was released more than 6 years ago and yet the sensor is still capable of doing beautiful things. I’ll let you be the judge of that with the photos spread through this post, but I think it’s rather good. The leaf shutter is dead-silent, which is great for shooting candid photos. I was also able to make good use of the built-in ND filter on a few occasion. It’s a neat feature that goes beyond just allowing shooting wide-open in broad daylight.
Of course the X100S carries its fair share of quirks, the most annoying one for me being the tendency to autofocus on the background rather than the subject standing a few feet away from you. Something you can’t see if you’re using the OVF. On a positive note, I don’t find the autofocus sluggish as I have read many times, but my most contemporary camera is from 2015, so I might not be the best juge.
Aside from that, I was skeptical about dealing with a fixed focal length, and using a rangefinder style camera. I’m left eye dominant, and always thought that meant rangefinders were out of reach for me. Turns out, I have absolutely no problem shooting with my right eye… Regarding the fixed lens, I’ve been using mostly primes for the past decade, and was able to accommodate to that restriction easily. I think the real challenge would be to decide whether to bring only this camera on a trip—something I’m not ready to commit to.
Two weeks is obviously too short to make an opinion on a camera, and that’s why I decided to flag this post as the “part 1” of the conversation. I will probably revisit my opinion in another post in the future.
