Well everyone’s heard about it, the great beacon of every photographers Longing, the Fujifilm X100VI, but is it as good as everyone makes out? and is it worth the money? I’ll keep it as brief as I can!

Lets start with the good, it looks amazing, that retro styling, especially in silver, with that dual rangefinder/evf in the top corner, it absolutely screams style. The closest thing to a Leica without having to spend Leica money, and just as stylish. The back screen particularly is made to perfection, the 1.62 million dots isnt the highest resolution but its sharp enough for such a small camera, however when the tilt mechanism was built it was purposefully designed to fit in flush to the back of the camera, like an early immovable display or a film camera without a rear display, it fits so perfectly you can almost forget its there, and if you turn it off in the settings, and set the EVF into rangefinder mode then suddenly you’ve a digital camera that shoots like a film camera, its very enticing.

The stabilised 40mp X-Trans5 sensor from the XT-5 sits in here giving you not just a fast reading sensor but finally a stabilised one, this being the first X100 series camera with image stabilisation, the magic they needed to use to get the stabilisation to fit in this camera and only add 3mm to the width mustve required some sort of deal with the Devil. Its all very impressive.

I often had to remind myself that the camera also features a built in 3 stop ND filter, one flick of a switch and suddenly you’re able to get some of those long exposure shots or drop the shutter speed a bit on crazy sunny days, forgetting to use it is the only real issue with it, and that’s more on me than the camera!

Lastly for the positives the Film simulations are, as anyone whose previously used them, still fantastic and still fun to use. The addition of RealaAce is also very welcome, though ultimately I stuck to classic Chrome 90% of the time.

For the most part the other bits of this are simply good enough, or OK. We have the auto focus, its fast enough but there’s some annoyance with the settings for switching between all the different focus options, and for all people complain about Sony’s menus I found the X100VI seemed to stumble at every opportunity menu wise, that we’ll save for later however.
The auto focus itself was good enough, once you set it to one of its focus target modes it would happily pick out a target in your focus area, though often it would bounce around or pick up the wrong target even with a reduced focus area. While a bit finicky compared to the modern Sony’s it did the job 90% of the time, though it did result in a few images being noticeably out of focus.

One of the bigger complaints id head regarding this camera was the lens, as its the same lens that was originally installed on the 26mp X100V that it couldn’t render images correctly now that it had a 40mp sensor behind it, and ultimately I couldn’t see any issues. If there was anything it was insignificant enough that only by pixel peeping the X100V and X100VI side by side would you notice anything. It is however noisy in operation, the focus motor is one of the loudest I’ve ever heard and its constant back and forth while trying to focus can be immensely annoying.
That said almost every image I got out of it was sharp enough to be useable, and considering its tiny size, and 35mm Equivalent Focal length its a perfect lens for street photography. So ultimately the 23mm F2 II lens on the X100VI is… fine.

The grip is also fine, theres just enough for you to keep hold of, but again we’re a slave to aesthetics, a bit of heat on a warm day and suddenly this little grip isnt quite enough. There are a number of after sales addons you can get, thumb grips, hand grips, cages, but adding most will increase the size and change the appearance of the camera and again we’re here for the appearance as much as anything so I chose to only use a thumb grip for an extra place to grip while only adding a minimal change to the silhouette paired with a wrist strap I felt much happier carrying it. Yet it still resulted in my death grip on the camera leaving my hand aching by the end of the day.

Ok, this is where I’m going to get the most hate, the BAD.
lets make this clear, none of these things on their own put me off, but together along with Sony releasing some smaller full frame cameras, allowing me to get that full frame copium as well as the retro styling of a smaller rangefinder like camera had me ultimately sell my X100VI.

Enough of that though! time for the bad.
Firstly lets talk about that auto focus, the focus itself isnt bad… but the menus to get there are bizarre. Lets take the sony, 1 option lets you set your focus target from various animals and transport types to eye auto focus on people and of course the focus is almost perfect each time with little goading, attaching this subject change to a custom button and on the fly you can 1 button change between focus targets. On the X100VI however, for some reason, the option to select animals or transports are in one place, while humans and eye auto focus is in another, and then once selected the option to pick how you’d like to meter is taken away from you, but only when setting the focus target to Eye auto focus, animals and other transports you can decide how you’d like to meter, but humans? nope tough we’re exposing for your focus target, get wrecked. It’s odd, not only do i have to make multiple changes to change my focus target but I then loose control of standard features.And thats ignoring that it sounds like the clunking of some ancient 2000BC Tomb mechanism finally waking after 4000 Years when auto focusing.

But more frustrating than that is the lens, I know I know! I said the lens was decent enough, but the fact that this “weather sealed” camera has an un-sealed lens is some sort of hilarious joke, considering the cost of the camera itself, the idea that the only thing stopping this lens being sealed against dust and stormy weather is a single ring of metal and a filter is jaw dropping, and not only that but to then decide that the weather sealing kit from fujifilm retails for £100/€120/$100 if its ever even available.
It just smacks of Fujifilm cutting features to try to find ways to charge you for yet more stuff once you’ve spent your hard earned moolah and then the bits you need are amazingly expensive for a small circle of metal and a cheap UV filter.

And that leads us to the price, now as a premium compact camera the price is a lot, at £1600 you can easily get an X-T50 and a WR 23mm F2, and that’s without needing to buy a weather sealing kit and with the newly released X-M5 there feels like even less reason to get one. in comparison, for £1600 you can get a brand new Sony a6700 with a couple of cheap lenses, or a Canon R50 with a few apsc lenses from 3rd parties. Hell, you could get a Ricoh GRII and GRIIx for the same price. It feels excessive.

With these limitations and a feeling that this camera was redundant within my camera setup, having had an a6400, a6700 and now an a7Cr, it felt like i was covered for the small pocketable everyday carry camera, and so ultimately i sold it.

So i guess ultimately was it worth it? Probably, the time I had with it was fun and the experience was enjoyable. Was it worth the money though? No, the frustrations outweighed the good things, ultimately it felt a lot like style over substance. Would I buy it again or one of the future iterations of the X100? probably not, though never say never!

Fujifilm X100VI

TTartisan 27mm f2.8 AF