Gadgetory

attractive to look at and sturdily built the Fujifilm ex-pro ones design and operation are for the most part very well executed there are only a couple of facepalm level annoyances well the counters not particularly compact it is a nice size for people who like a little heft especially if you're used to shooting a DSLR I do wish the grip were a little deeper though you dial in both shutter speed and aperture with a real old-fashioned aperture ring on the XF lenses putting the ring in a enter shutter priority mode setting the shutter speed to a puts you an aperture priority if you've got both on a you're in full auto my one complaint with the scheme is the slavish adherence to history means that you're stuck with a full stop shutter speed in shutter priority mode I've gotten used to shooting at speeds like an 80th of a second on the other hand the lens's aperture dial does support third stops which is a really nice feature overall I found the control layout and button design comfortable it's kind of annoying that when you hit the macro button you then have to arrow over to macro mode it should just toggle there's only a single user assignable control as well and given that there are multiple relatively unused controls this is a bit disappointing on the upside the expo one has seven custom setting slots that are easily accessed via the quick menu like the X 100 the X Pro one uses a hybrid viewfinder that can swap between a reverse Galilean type with an electronic overlay and a straight EVF the View mode button on the back rotates among the optical and electronic viewfinders and I auto sensor and this switch on the front toggles between the optical and electronic viewfinders my biggest overall problem with the design is the placement of the SD card slot in the battery compartment which just doesn't work well for advanced and pro photographers who frequently take the card out but even worse the X Pro ones battery compartment is right next to the tripod mount and pretty far to the right rather than in the middle and this makes it a pain to pull the card when the camera is mounted on a tripod plus it means you can't even open the battery compartment when using one of those tiny tripod mount attachments for a sling strap also the battery isn't teed to a particular directions so it's really easy to put it in backwards and then wonder why the camera won't power on as for features the X Pro one provides the basics and nothing more perhaps even a little less given the price there's no on camera flash and it's got a fixed LCD the camera uses a new sensor the 16 megapixel x-trans which in combination with mostly intelligent JPEG processing delivers excellent photo quality across low and mid-range ISO sensitivities in combination with the sharp XF lenses very good detail resolution color and tonal range the sensor itself has a large latitude in that I was able to shoot a couple of ISO stops down from where I might normally be in low-light and still get clean images in night shots the high ISO sensitivity images did look more traditional with that soft grainy and hot pixel look but the fact is with the X Pro one you really don't need to shoot at those settings as often as you usually do the camera also produces consistent and appropriate exposures and with one exception the colors are both accurate and vibrant the video is a mixed bag it's sharp with bright colors and then low-light the noise looks pretty good but it otherwise displays a cornucopia of aliasing soirée and rolling shutter artifacts while the autofocus has trouble staying locked the lenses are nicely designed for manually focusing unfortunately the X Pro 1 is also disappointingly slow thanks to sluggish image processing and a finicky autofocus system the most frustrating aspect is that the better lens the 35 millimeter is much slower to focus than the 18 millimeter lens which simply is in a sharp ironically the continuous shooting performance is pretty good stellar photo quality and a beautiful looking mostly streamlined design make the Fujifilm X pro on a really attractive camera for deep-pocketed enthusiasts but poor autofocus performance and a bare-bones feature set make it harder to recommend for a general audience than it should be and a new sensor design means RAW processing support will take longer to appear than I'd like it's a nice compromise if you can't afford a Leica but want to approximate the experience and get some stunning photo quality to boot I'm Laurie Vernon and this is the Fuji film x-pro 1