Thoughts On The Fujifilm X100 Digital Camera Series

❦ First Published on

These are my notes about the Fujifilm X100 series of digital cameras that I’ve been using since 2013 when I bought an X100S after photographing with Leica M9, M8, and M3 rangefinders and other cameras for many years. Links to videos and photos will appear shortly.

The X100VI by the X100S.

X100VI

I wrote a postcard from Seattle to bosses at Fujifilm thanking them for making the X100VI and asking how to get one more quickly to The Camera Shop in Traverse City, Michigan, where I was on the wait list for the illusive camera after paying an advance in February 2024.

Not sure if the card helped, but I got a call from Molly and drove up to get my X100VI (here’s its manual) in September 2024.

The X100VI is somewhat popular due to social media marketing dance meme craziness and its classic film camera looks inspired by the Leica M3 design. It actually deserves it, because it is a very nice digital camera with unique features:

  • Both an electronic viewfinder (EVF) for precise focussing and exposure preview, and, most exciting for this candid photographer, an optical viewfinder (OVF) with a clear view of the real world with a frame over it. Each can be instantly switched to using a nice lever selector on the front of the camera, and the X100VI can even place a thumbnail of the EVF view on the corner of the OVF, which they call the Electronic Range Finder (ERF) so you get both EVF and OVF simultaneously. Bravo!
  • Weather sealing for wet rainy conditions.
  • Neutral Density (ND) filter.
  • A quiet leaf shutter that lets you sync flash at most any speed.
  • Ability to transfer photos to your pocket computer or up to the “cloud” wirelessly.
  • Giganto 40 megapixel sensor that enables the useful existence of a digital teleconverter so we have 35mm default “seeing” field of view, 50mm “looking at” Cartier-Bresson view (hold your arm out streight and open your hand and that’s roughly the 50mm view), and 70mm “examining” portrait view. You can also get adaptors to get the “perceiving” 28mm view, and maybe 21mm “sensing” view.
  • High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format to help your storage media manage the big file sizes without throwing up too much money.
  • Image stabilization for those who want very sharp photographs yet have shaky hands and, or, photograph in the dark.
  • Even Koudelka likes it.

Though it looks like one, the X100VI is not a mechanical rangefinder camera because the control ring of the lens keeps spinning rather than stopping somewhere:

The great advantage of a rangefinder is this: With some practice and experience you can reliably focus the camera without putting it to your eye or pointing it at the subject. You can do this because the lens rotation stops at both far and close focus points and you can judge the focus distance by feeling the relative position of the finger tab on the lens, or, if you’re less experienced, by looking at the distance markings on the lens.

So not the perfect digital camera for this photographer, yet, but given the price of Leicas and their competition, it is close enough.

Thank you, Molly, Gavin, Bob, Jason, Fuji bossess and employees, ship and airplane pilots and controllers, delivery drivers, food, infrastructure, and government staff, artists, tax payers, and everyone else in human civilization, including you, who make the existence of a machine that records moments in time, like this one, possible.

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Notes

Ongoing thoughts about the Fujifilm X100VI will be noted down here and edited into the paragraphs above over time.

  • Accidentally dropping and kicking the X100S, which kept on going.
  • Yakuza 0 reference.
  • Wanted: Trip to Japan to photograph.
  • 2 million menu settings.
  • How to turn off rear LCD with a button.
  • X100S candid photos.
  • User interface. Touch screen.
  • Check battery life.
  • No charger included (Fujifilm BC-W126S Battery Charger). Needs to be purchased separatly. We can charge the battery inside the camera by connecting it to a computer using an included USB-C cable.
  • X100VI is around 50 grams heavier than prior X100s.
  • Tiltable LCD monitor.
  • Manual ISO selector.
  • If uninterested, lazy, or lack the time to develop raw images in your own workflow, there are a selection of film simulation settings that are applied to JPEGs in-camera.


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