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New Fuji X-E1

cliffpatte said:
why not get the Fuji 35mm lens. Its the best 35mm lens for that camera. It lives on my X-Pro1 99% of the time.
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I probably will, but I'm pretty sure the 18mm will be my most frequently used lens, and I have a hankering for something more "characterful" and retro for the 35mm. I quite fancied a Leitz Summaron, as I was told it was on the soft side, but I've now been told it isn't, so maybe off the radar now. Compared with the German new stuff, the Fuji is amazing quality and embarrassingly cheap.
 
Any one used both the X-E1 and X100 and comment on their relative merits ?
I've got my eye on a X100 refurb or may be push the boat out and consider an X-E1 with the 35mm ..

I'm thinking Cliff may have the whole X family of light boxes .... : )
 
At the moment I own both. In some ways they are similar, but I could make a case for both! I love the x100 as it takes really good quality pictures and it's always in my pocket. 60% of all my "exhibition" images taken in the last 18 months have been taken with the x100. You don't have to decide which lens(es) to carry, there is just one, and it's a great lens. Its silent in operation, so very discrete.

I've just bought the XE-1 - it's faster, the resolution is better, and the viewfinder is better, but that is good, as it's the only option. The X-pro has an optical finder, but that tiny bit of extra bulk means it won't fit in my pocket. I have the 18mm lens, though at the moment it's got my Zeiss 50mm f1.4 on it. I think I will buy other Fuji lenses for it as they are amazingly good for the money.

I am selling my x100 as the XE-1 does everything the X100 does, and I'm probably selling my Canon 5d as I think the XE-1 will do everything that does for me too.

A lot of what makes these cameras so good is difficult to put into words, you really need to handle them - they just feel like they have been designed and developed by photographic enthusiasts. They remind me of my much loved Contax SLRs - solidly built tools that just do the job.

I know this is blasphemy, but having fantasised about a Leica M9 for some time, I finally had a chance to use one. I had the best part of £8000 of kit around my neck, and it felt heavy, cumbersome and rather too much like hard work to use. The x100 felt much more "part of me". Saved myself a small fortune I hadn't got anyway!
 
Thanks for that Jem.

I'm looking for a camera to carry about all the time. I have Nikon dslrs and a whole gaggle of 35 and 120 film cameras. The one I always have with me is the phone or a little Panasonic LX3. I have a Leica III and I love the mechanical look and feel.

If you could only keep one - would it be the X-Pro, X-E1 or X100(s) ?
 
firestorm said:
Any one used both the X-E1 and X100 and comment on their relative merits ?
I've got my eye on a X100 refurb or may be push the boat out and consider an X-E1 with the 35mm ..

I'm thinking Cliff may have the whole X family of light boxes .... : )
Click to expand...

The XE1 is pointless if you already have the XPRO1

I might get an x100s to replace the x100 as a carry round or I might swap that role to an RX1 or Coolpix A

Fuji need to speed up lens development for X series IMO
 
firestorm said:
Thanks for that Jem.

I'm looking for a camera to carry about all the time. I have Nikon dslrs and a whole gaggle of 35 and 120 film cameras. The one I always have with me is the phone or a little Panasonic LX3. I have a Leica III and I love the mechanical look and feel.

If you could only keep one - would it be the X-Pro, X-E1 or X100(s) ?
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If I could only have one, I'd keep the XE-1 - in fact that is probably what I will do.
 
Surprised you find the XE-1 viewfinder better than the X100 Jem. The reason I went for the X100 and then the X-Pro1 was because of the hybrid viewfinder and use them in optical mode 99.9% of the time. I find continuous use of EVFs where you would expect to see an SLR VF or a Rangefinder VF gives me headaches.

Does the EVF on the XE-1 have a diopter adjustment?
 
cliffpatte said:
Surprised you find the XE-1 viewfinder better than the X100 Jem. The reason I went for the X100 and then the X-Pro1 was because of the hybrid viewfinder and use them in optical mode 99.9% of the time. I find continuous use of EVFs where you would expect to see an SLR VF or a Rangefinder VF gives me headaches.

Does the EVF on the XE-1 have a diopter adjustment?
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I should have clarified!
When I first started using the X100 I used the optical viewfinder almost exclusively, but I realised some months ago that I had drifted into using the EVF more. The EVF in the XE-1 did worry me, but after about 2 mins of looking through it at Focus, I was convinced I could live with it. Its dramatically better than the X100 in EVF mode, better resolution, less "smear". In an ideal world, I'd have a X-Pro, and so the best of both worlds, but I'd need a bigger pocket, and a bigger wallet.

It also has dioptric adjustment, and goes to -4.00 so is actually usable for me... my 5D only goes to about -3.00 so no use to me at all. I'm not sure how far the X100 goes, as its out on loan to a potential purchaser!
 
So how did Fuji manage to reinvent themselves as a maker of cameras instead of a manufacturer of film?

Looks like they've done a great job though even though they're still known as Fujifilm

Shame that Kodak weren't able to do the same.

These X series cameras do look interesting...
 
Fuji have been making cameras for decades, and some really amazing ones too. I had a Fuji ST605 in the early '80s, and met a brilliant photographer a few years back who was still using his! The Hassleblad X-Pan? Its a Fuji. They also did/do a great 6x7 rangefinder - using film... I have a friend who uses one as his "compact" as carrying his Gandolfi up mountains is a bit of a chore! So, they are not new to the game, and seem to have photographers in mind when they design products.
 
Fuji have been making Hasselblad's (645 digital) cameras (H1, H2, H3, H4) for them for more than a decade. They never stopped making good cameras, but you might have seen them badged as Hasselblad, or Voigtander ... etc
 
I still have a Fuji STX1 - in its day on of the cheapest full manual cameras from the early 80's. (£65) I think they had been making cameras for decades before that ie fold up bellows type.
Fuji Lenses were high quality but they started to use dedicated bayonet which limited their market.

The early cheap P&S Finepix A330 is very nice to use (3.2 Mp) far nicer than my Nikon equivalent here is a 330 photo
sapwr_zps06b8534e.jpg
 
Thanks for the info guys. The first Fuji camera I knew of was their Nikon bodied digital SLR & their large format gear. I know the DSLRwas a favourite of wedding & social snappers at that early digital time. Still think they've done fantastic in that time. Was a big fan of their colour film products at the time too.
 
I've now had my X-E1 for a couple of weeks, and I'm beginning to get used to it. Although its counterintuitive to me, I have to report that the jpg output is in most cases better than the Raw and better than the Raw plus a bit of tweaking too... One quite remarkable observation is that when using the XF 18mm lens the jpg conversion seems to compensate for a bit of distortion and offers better edge sharpness. In fact the image quality of this combination is in a different league to my Canon 5D with 24-105 L lens...
 
I read somewhere that RAW Fuji & Lightroom / Photoshop are problematic & that Silkypix is the program best suited to a Fuji sensor

In what way is the X-E1 counter intuitive?
 
It's not the camera that is counterintuitive - its just that I've spent the last xx years looking for cameras that offered RAW, and suddenly I have a camera that produces jpgs that I would exhibit! It's a bit of a culture shock!
 
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