Everyone Loves This Camera - I Can See Why

[Music] if you like a hand with the door you're welcome no problem there you go my pleasure no problem at all one good deep for the day [Music] anyway this is quite possibly one of the most loved Fujifilm cameras of all time I'm talking about the Fuji film xt1 and almost 10 years after its initial release it seems that countless photographers are still using this as the go-to photography camera despite having four predecessors well soon to be five if the rumors are true so I know what you're probably thinking why does it have such a loyal fan base how has it stood the test of time so well and why is yours red well I promise I will explain the color scheme a little bit later on but as for the other two questions I was also just as intrigued so I decided to buy one for myself and I immediately discovered the first reason why I think this is such a desire able camera the price now it's no secret that future film cameras new and used have gone up in price quite significantly over the past year or so partly due to they being low Supply and very high demand so a more affordable way to enter into the Fujifilm camera system is to purchase an older secondhand model enter the xt1 because there's an abundance of them online for sale and due to its age you can find them at bargain prices now I should add that obviously the price for used cameras will vary hugely depending on which country you live in and where you buy them from but I was able to buy mine here in the UK for around £200 or roughly $250 which is actually incredible value once you dive into the specs of this camera and that leads me nicely onto reason number two on my list of reasons why I think people think this camera is so great now at the time the xt1 was fujifilm's first DSLR style mirrorless interchangeable lens camera because prior to this all of the mirrorless cameras they released were based off a rangefinder style of design straight out of the gate this camera received very high praise and won a number of awards and it effectively sparked Fujifilm to produce a whole tree of these cameras under the XT lineage you know the drill the more zeros it has at the end the lower down the pecking order it sits but this original xt1 well this was designed as a serious professional grade camera so much so that Fujifilm just about threw every feature at their disposal into this camera including the second generation of XTR sensor which produces 16 megap images we'll obviously talk about the sensor and image quality later on but for now I just want to say that this camera body feels so solid in the hand it's dust resistant it's water resistant it's even freeze prooof down to as low as -1° C or 14° F though one thing to bear in mind is that not all Fuji film lenses are weather sealed themselves so if you want maximum protection from the elements you will need to check the specs of the lenses you buy now inside this camera it has both a mechanical shutter and electronic shutter and the latter is great for street photography in particular because it'll allow you to shoot silently the evf was a noticeable Improvement on this camera compared to previous releases and it actually provided a larger display than some of the full-frame dslrs of its time plus it also packs in a 3-in tiltable screen which is helpful for shooting at lower angles but aside from that the one thing that immediately struck me when I picked up this camera for the first time was just the slightly crazy amount of manual controls and dials there's a dial for ISO there's one for shutter speed there's even a large exposure compensation dial what's more the dials have their own dials so around the iso and shter speed dials you have settings for Drive modes and also the metering modes and you know if that wasn't quite enough dial action for you there's even two command dials one above the rear thumb rest and one above the front grip the rear command dial allows you to adjust the aperture if your lens doesn't have a manual apertur ring or if you set the shutter speed dial to t you can adjust the shutter speed using the front command D instead now I should say at this point that if you're a new photographer and you're potentially eyeing this up as your first camera and that display of beautiful chaos is a little bit overwhelming for you then don't panic because you can just set most of these DS to automatic so that the camera will do the work for you whilst you get to grip with the fundamentals of Photography but if you actually enjoy the process of manually dialing in your exposure settings there aren't many digital cameras I can think of that make this process quite as fun I think ultimately the point I'm trying to make here is that this camera offers so much flexibility allowing it to mold itself to just about any photographer's preferred shooting style after hearing all of that you might think that this is a big camera but in fact it's not it's actually noticeably smaller than my Fujifilm X Pro 2 which is impressive that they've managed to fit so much onto a very reasonable Siz body speaking of impressive this was actually the first of fujifilm's mirrorless cameras to include phase detect Auto Focus before then the rangefinder style cameras like the X pro 1 the xe1 and the xm1 all had to make do with slower contrast detect AF I mean bear in mind this is a 10-year-old camera so the accuracy and speed of this thing is going to be what you would probably expect and also the face to take points are grouped in nine dots in the center but nonetheless it still gets the job done sadly though this is the only camera in the singled digit XT line that does not include a joystick on the back so moving the active AF Point around has to be done using the d-pad which which is a little bit fiddly though I've got to say that hasn't been a problem for me because I've mainly been shooting with this manual focus bright and Star 28 mm f2.8 pancake lens now although this lens is currently only available in like a m Mount all you need to do is buy a cheap adapter from eBay for like 10 bucks and that will allow you to basically use it on any kind of camera body obviously I got Fuji X Mount And if you are interested in doing that I will leave a link to both the adapter that I bought and the lens itself in the description of this video now if you like the idea of using a manual lens like this but you're a compl complet novice when it comes to focusing manually like maybe I am then the good news is that the camera also comes with a bunch of visual aids to help you obviously it has the obligatory focus peaking mode which works absolutely fine but personally I preferred using the digital Split Image which basically works like a split field diopter on a film camera if you're not sure what that is then basically how it works is that when your subject is out of focus the two halves of the image will appear split so all you need to do is a just the focus until the two halves line up so before I move on to talking about image quality there are obviously going to be a few downsides to buying an older camera like this some of them will be fairly obvious like you know video features being pretty outdated because this thing maxes out at 1080p at 60 frames per second which could be a little bit limiting there's also no built-in image stabilization and although personally that didn't bother me at all I did think it was worth mentioning just in case that made it onto your list of must have features but also this particular model of camera seems to share characteristics of a snake mag by that I mean after some time it will decide to shed its skin or more specifically the rubber gri goes a bit gooey and comes away from the body honestly at first I thought the previous owner might have loved this camera a little bit too much if if you catch my drift but uh obviously after some research I did find out that this can be a common problem for older XT ons to fix this rubber issue if you're lucky and the rubber is still in good condition you should just be able to stick it back in place though unfortunately for me the rubber on this camera seems to have stretched and warped over time which means that it no longer fits onto the camera so I decided to be a bit crafty and just replace the whole thing with a nice red leather using some reference images that I took I made up some templates in illustrator and then just used my mother-in-law's die cutter to accurately cut out the leather cheers Cass now this leather I bought came with an adhesive backing so I just had to peel it off and stick it on the only part I couldn't recover was the rear thumb rest because the leather just would not mold over it properly so I ended up using some epoxy putty to make it look a little bit neater now I'm not going to lie to you this whole process was way more fiddly and time intensive than I've made it look here and it certainly requires a level of skill and finesse that I do not possess but overall I think it came out okay you know if you squint a little but either way I will leave links again in the description for the leather and the putty I used if you do want to go ahead at having a go customizing your own camera so Cosmetics aside let's talk about the real thing that matters which is the image quality because you may be wondering how does this 10-year-old camera stack up against modern-day technology well as I've kind of touched on this camera uses the second generation of X trans sensor which is an APS C size chip and although there is often a lot of debate online about which X trans sensor is the best all I can say is that this camera is more than capable of producing stunning photos with bags of detail although some people may say that 16 megapixels is a tad on the low side by today's standard in my opinion it's still plenty enough real estate to play around with especially for just posting images online or creating modest Siz prints and with this being a Fujifilm camera you obviously get access to Fuji's film simulation modes too now with this being an earlier model obviously it's not going to have quite the extensive range of film Sims as some of the newer models but it does have classic Chrome and you can still find a healthy number of film recipes for second generation XTR sensors by various online blogs which are always fun to play around with you know what the more I handle this camera the more I understand why people love it and I can actually see a lot of me in this camera sure we're both getting long in the tooth and we're not the fastest anymore and if you look closely enough everything is unraveling at the seams but what matters is that it's still very capable and definitely has life in it yet yeah there's definitely less similarities now I think about it

Channel: Tom Calton

Views: 118,883

Keywords: tom calton, tom carlton, street photography, street photography camera, fujifilm x-t1, fuji xt1, x-t1, fujifilm, fujifilm camera, cheap fujifilm camera, cheap fujifilm mirrorless camera, cheap street photography camera, budget street photography camera, best street photography camera, cheap mirrorless camera, cheap photography cameras, budget photography camera, brightin star 28mm f2.8, fujifilm x-t1 review, fuji x-t1, fuji x-t1 review, x-t1 review, fujifilm xt1

Id: vbM_YsUfYIw

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023