I took the XPro1 along to a book signing yesterday in a local bookshop where Aaron Michael Ritchey, a college friend of my wife, was signing his first novel “The Never Prayer”.

The store was well lit so even at low ISO, the Xpro1 performed admirably (although I wish I used a smaller aperture in the photo above to get the name card in focus).

1/30 at f/2.0 (ISO 6400)

1/300 at f/2.0 (ISO 6400)

1/350 at f/2.0 (ISO 6400)

All shots taken using the built in B&W JPG setting. Lightroom used for re-sizing only.

When the Fujifilm X-Pro1 briefly appeared on Amazon’s website earlier this year, I immediately hit the buy button on the body and an 18mm lens. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted this camera but I have been toying with the idea of getting rid of my Canon 40D and getting something smaller. I already have a Canon S95 (and a smart phone) for when I need something that will fit in my jeans pockets but I also wanted something that was the digital equivalent of my Leica M2 in size. The Fujifilm X-Pro1 seemed to fit the bill.

For more than two months I waited to see if the “Currently out of stock” label changed and last week the camera officially became available in the USA. This week the black boxes arrived at my door step so I thought I would write about my first impressions. I didn’t get much chance to shoot with the camera today because it was raining outside but in the coming weeks I’ll review the overall image quality when I take it out for a real test drive.

First of all, you can check the Fujifilm official website for all of the specs but these are the highlights:-

- Hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder
- ISO 200 to 6400 (expandable to 25600)
- 16.3 MP APS-C size sensor.
- XF lens mount (a new mount from Fujifilm) with m-mount adapter available for using Leica mount lenses.

Look and Feel

In the looks department, this camera is pretty nice. It is styled like a classic rangefinder although it is technically not a rangefinder camera. Size-wise it is quite similar to the Leica M2 but it is a little bit lighter. The M2 with a Voigtlander 35mm F/1.4 weighs a little under 2 lbs whereas the X-Pro1 with the 18mm F/2 lens weighs in at around 1.4 lbs.

For my hands, the camera is a good fit. I haven’t played around with it long yet but the buttons you will use most appear to be well placed.

I got the 18mm F/2 lens which is about a 28mm in 35mm film terms and this is a great lens. It feels quite light but the lens has a real aperture ring which is great. On top of the camera is a real shutter dial which I also love. (No more fiddling with multi-purpose thumb wheels).

First Shooting Impressions

Before the camera arrived I read a lot about how this camera was slow to focus.  I don’t have any high end DSLRs so maybe I don’t know what I am missing but personally I didn’t notice any focus problems. It didn’t lock in zero seconds but it was acceptable. Even indoors in subdued light, the focus worked just fine.

I was pretty impressed with the image quality. The standard JPEGs look great and the high ISO settings are very usable. (See the ISO 3200 sample below).

There are “film simulation” modes but up to now I have mainly stuck with the “Standard” which is supposed to emulate the look of Fujifilm Provia.

What needs to be improved

This camera is not without its quirks and is by no stretch of the imagination a “perfect” camera. Here are a few of the items that would be on my wish list to fix in the next firmware update:-

Needs a smarter Auto ISO.
The auto ISO function needs to have a selectable minimum shutter speed. During my testing with the Auto ISO maximum set to 1600, the X-pro1 tried to use the lowest ISO setting possible but at a shutter speed of 1/30th. Since my test model was my dog, 1/30th was much slower than I would have liked and I would have preferred to use something like ISO 800 instead of 200 if I could have had a more reasonable shutter speed.

Aperture blade clicking.
I saw some videos of this on Youtube. Some people call it aperture chatter and others call it rattlesnaking. When the camera is switched on appears to continuously adjust the aperture. I’m not sure if it is trying to control exposure continuously but the clicking is quite annoying. Also it doesn’t happen all the time but so far I haven’t figured out exactly under which conditions the chatter does occur. I do know that the work around is to set the function button to DOF view which will lock the blades until you take a shot but it is waste of a good button. I hope Fujifilm fix this soon.

Update: On April 24th 2012, Fujifilm released a firmware update that greatly reduces the aperture blade clicking.

Some Sample Photos

These are a few test shots I took in the back yard and house. I haven’t loaded the included Silkypix raw converter on to my computer yet (and Lightroom does not support currently the RAW format) so these are all out-of-the-camera JPEGs. (Only thing I did in the computer was to re-sized them to fit on this web page).

All these photos were taken with the 18mm lens and at f/2 (for no reason other than I like that aperture).

Over the next few weeks I plan to take the camera for a real test drive so watch the blog for more updates.

1/250 @ f/2 ISO 400

1/110 @ f/2 ISO 3200

1/850 @ f/2 ISO 400

This post was originally posted on my old blog on April 11th, 2012.