Kris Atomic archive

Last month I got a Fuji x100 and promised to report back with my thoughts. On the whole I'm SUPER SUPER happy and it has completely exceeded (my already sky high) expectations. Using it is, at first, a challenge and the menus/settings are admittedly a bit insane. But the the possibility of such great image quality in a compact (and let's face it, super stylish) package outweighs any small annoyances. As much as I hate this word, it's definitely quirky though.

A few things I love about it: great straight out of camera jpgs, handy auto iso, surprisingly good little flash, amazing macro, almost silent for lurking/ street photos, great performance at high ISO. The image quality is impressive and it's light and small and pretty. I know for some people the fixed lens might be an issue, but as someone who only shoots with one lens anyway, I like it. It also means that even at F2 it's dead on and you don't have to worry about calibration blah blah blah.

Not so great: slower focusing than I'm used to on dslr, battery doesn't go far (3rd party batteries are only about £6 on ebay though), you need a good fast memory card or it can be slow to start up. You definitely need to read the manual to get anything decent out of it, it doesn't seem to follow any rhyme nor reason of normal cameras, aka quirky!

While reading lots of reviews I saw endless comparisons with the leica m9, which to my eyes are completely in the x100's favour. Sure there's a small difference, but is it £4000 of difference? I think not. Anyway, even if I was willing to drop £5000 I wouldn't spend it on an M9. Life is short, I need autofocus!

(Because I'm so psyched with it, this all sounds a bit like an advertorial, so to clarify: it isn't. I paid for it myself.)