Gadgetory

well hey guys it's David with The Verge and this is the Fujifilm x10 it's a brand new $599 camera but it looks just like a camera from 50 years ago the Leica m3 that's really really good-looking it's made out of magnesium with synthetic leather all over it as tons of manual controls it has dials and buttons and switches for just about everything you could possibly want to do but they're kind of confusingly laid out so sometimes you'll be looking for a menu and it'll be just in a different place than you'd think it would be so there's there's a pretty big learning curve just starting to use this camera it does have a hot shoe so you can add a better flash or an electronic viewfinder or any of a number of other accessories to the camera there's also an optical viewfinder on the camera but it's a little different than normal ones it doesn't look through the lens and instead has a window off to the side it's a rangefinder style viewfinder what you see isn't what you get from the picture so sometimes you can frame a picture and it'll end up looking totally different than what you thought inside there's Fujifilm zone EXR processor and it's really good especially in low light it compensates really well for bad lighting and gives you nose free images that you wouldn't normally be able to get there's also a 12 megapixel sensor and all that adds up to a pretty fast shooting performance it can shoot up to seven frames per second at full resolution but it's actually kind of slow otherwise the camera takes about three seconds to turn on it does have a cool mechanism that lets you actually rotate the lens to turn the camera on and off but once you do it there's about a two to three second gap before the camera actually powers on all that said the x10 takes really really fantastic photos I can shoot in JPEG or in RAW and the photos I got were really clear and the colors were really great up to ISO 1600 once I got 230 260 400 photos weren't very good there was a lot of noise and they started to be soft but they were still usable at Facebook sizes the one problem I had with the photos was that the autofocus when you're zoomed in didn't work particularly well but thankfully there's this really great super macro mode that lets you get a centimeter away and still get clear pictures of the subject it's a really cool trick when you're shooting something close up the x10 can shoot video at 1080p at 30 frames per second and the video like the photos looks really great it's clear and accurate it also has stereo mics which is a nice bonus for the sound overall if you like Fuji films design and can get over the learning curve of getting used to the x10 you'll really like the camera it takes really great pictures and performs really well but at this price and in this form factor it's hard to recommend it over cameras like the Sony nex-5n and some of the Micro Four Thirds cameras on the market which are a lot simpler to use and thanks to interchangeable lenses can be a little more versatile