Letter from Gordon to Luminous Landscape Reichman:
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Thank you for your review of the fuji x100. I've had mine a week now, and agree with all your comments, both positive and negative.
I have made my living as a photographer since 1971. I've never pre-ordered a camera before this and was very excited to get it.
I am having a love/hate relationship with this thing. More hate than love at the moment.
This camera has such promise, but is full of glitches and stupidisms which are spoiling my pleasure in using it.
I'll try to be brief, but if you have any influence with fuji at all, I'd love to make them aware of my issues.
1: My latest issue is the camera locking up. The little light that blinks as it is ever so slowly writing to the card stays lit and the camera will do nothing unil in frustration I just take the battery out and put it back in to "reboot" the thing. Arggghh.
2: Manual focus. The ring, and viewfinder, as you mention, are useless. I too love using the ael afl button to focus, and this works pretty well. Problem is. If you pre-focus, then pick the camera up to take a quick shot, it may or may not actually respond, or may take a second to pull itself together before the shutter releases. I've already lost a bunch of shots this way.
3: In manual focus, I cannot get rid of that huge distracting distance scale which obscures the bottom frame line at close distances, even if I uncheck the box in the menus that is supposed to hide it. Fuji has decided I don't really mean it when I say I dont want to see the thing.
4: Battery life. Not very long, and when the battery warning comes on, it is too late, you get a couple of shots before it shuts down.
5: I never shut my dslrs off. I just let them go to sleep. That way, like a computer in sleep mode, it comes awake with the touch of a button. I can carry around my dslrs, and instantly bring the camera up to my eye and take a shot whenever I want. Not so with the fuji. Even in quick start mode, it may wake up, or it may not. I have not figured out ryme or reason, perhaps it times out. If it DOES start up when I hit the shutter button, I must press it again to actually take the picture. It it doesn't start up when I press the shutter button, I have to turn the off/on switch off, then on for the camera to yawn and wake up. Sometimes I have to do it twice. By then my shot is gone. This has happened to me countless times this past week. I'm going nuts. For a camera aimed a street shooters, this is crazy making.
6: For God's sake, why would I want to be using an optical viewfinder, or the efv for that matter, and have it display a preview in the viewfinder? It is horrible. I can't think of a feature I'd rather have less. It is like photographic coitus interuptus. SHOW ME THE PREVIEW ON THE BACK OF THE CAMERA, LIKE A DSLR DOES, or at least give me the option. I've turned the thing off, but it means I have to wait for the camera to slowly write to the card, then press playback and wait again for it to slowly display the preview. Then if I want to look at the histogram, I have to cycle through view modes. I also have not discovered if I can turn on a highlight alert.
7: Focus spot parallax. At close distances, the actual focus spot is up and to the left of where it seems to be. In some situations, this results in focusing behind the intended area.
8: Everything is sluuugggiiiish.
I'm trying hard to love this camera, but am pretty pissed off with it at the moment. It is fine for deliberate stuff, but for spontaneous shooting it sucks.
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