The very first thing I seen concerning the Fujifilm X Half is simply how small and light-weight it’s. The digital camera is designed to present you no excuses — it’s best to be capable to convey it with you in all places. And after spending a couple of 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 scorching shoe, and it will possibly’t even take RAW photographs. It’s very simple to have a look at that listing of lacking options and disrespect the digital camera altogether.
But the X Half’s simplicity could be very a lot the purpose. This is a digital camera for taking scrappy, fast photographs and capturing reminiscences. A variety of its flaws are masked with movie simulations, filters, and superimposed grain. Its limitations are a function, not a bug.
The digital camera comes with a set 32mm equal f/2.8 lens. Even with all of the added grain and filters turned off, I discovered it to carry out very effectively. The dynamic vary is suitable with pure spotlight falloff, edges are sharp, and there’s even some bokeh should you plan accordingly. But I didn’t need to take these sorts of photographs with this digital camera.
Fujifilm loaded the X Half with various its hottest movie simulations, which mimic the look of traditional movies, and it additionally added a bunch of recent filters. There’s halation, mirror mode (throwback to Apple’s Photo Booth, anybody?), selective colour, dynamic tone, fish eye, and a lot extra. Some of those are downright foolish, however some are endearing and kooky. My favourite was the sunshine leak. It provides mild leaks to your photographs in a random trend, 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 photographs aspect by aspect. This function makes an entire lot extra sense in a movie digital camera, however Fujifilm is attempting to copy the thought for a digital world. You begin a diptych by cranking the lever such as you would on a movie digital camera. (Although in contrast to a movie digital camera, a digital digital camera may report a video, so that may now be a part of your diptych, too.)
Then there’s movie mode, which is designed to extra carefully mimic an analog digital camera. It mainly locks you out of utilizing trendy options and transferring too rapidly. There’s no approach 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 subsequent photograph, you’re locked into a particular look till you’ve completed your “roll,” and there’s no approach to play again the photographs you’ve simply taken both. It is well 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 another way.
This mode completely encapsulates why I don’t thoughts the exclusion of an electrical viewfinder. Using 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 performed together with your complete roll. Once you’re performed, the digital roll “rewinds” and you may take a look at your photographs within the app. Unfortunately the app isn’t finalized and wasn’t accessible throughout my demo, however the recordsdata are nonetheless saved on the SD card.
The solely fast unfavourable, no pun supposed, I’ve seen up to now is that the digital camera simply feels a bit sluggish. Despite utilizing a reasonably quick SD card, write speeds appeared sluggish and took me out of the second quite a lot of instances. Creating 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 Film mode, the place you need to “advance the movie” after every shot. I discovered myself having to attend for the earlier photograph to save lots of earlier than cranking the lever.
Even the primary touchscreen, which is basically 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 photographs. Some inputs weren’t registering even after a couple of makes an attempt, and I wasn’t the one one on the digital camera occasion with the identical problem.
Despite these points, I completely loved my transient time with the digital camera and was often delighted by the intelligent concepts the Fujifilm crew applied right here. I hope to see extra firms making daring choices with {hardware} and software program like this that alter the expertise of utilizing the digital camera.
There are way more succesful cameras at an analogous value level. But should you’re in search of one thing refreshing and joyful, the X Half is shaping as much as be a superb little digital camera.
