Fuji X100VI camera review

[Music] greetings once again photography Pals and for the 1,000th video on this channel I'm going to be checking out something pretty fun oceans of journalistic Ink have been spilled about the iconic Fuji X100 series of cameras with their beautiful bodies big apsc sized sensors and classy fixed lenses I remember when the original came out I was taken by surprise as friends I had who had never shown much interest in photography before were telling me their plans to spend over ,000 on one of these despite knowing it didn't have a zoom function or interchangeable lens but with each new iteration of the camera like each new Harry Potter book that came out over the years the hype and the waiting lists for them have just gotten bigger and bigger and the new Fuji X100 Mark 6 which you see here is bound to be on pre-order for a long time to come well let's test it out and see if it's worth a wait I'd like to thank Fuji UK for loaning me one of these for a couple of weeks for test thing although as usual this is a totally independent review I have a feeling I'm going to like this camera so I'll try my best to snuffle out any of its weaknesses it comes in a black or silver finish I much prefer the silver and the camera's price for those who even care at this point is £1,600 here in the UK or $1,600 before sales tax this new model stands out from its predecessors by offering one of Fuji's very high resolution for 40 map sensors as well as useful six-top inbody image stabilization improved video shooting options including 6.2k and 10bit footage subject detection autofocus and a slightly improved screen among a number of other new features so it could potentially be well worth upgrading to the Mark 6 from a previous camera if you appreciate very detailed image quality or any other of those things it's an impressive upgrade in my opinion for those of you interested coming soon to this channel is a review of the 23mm F2 lens that is permanently attached to the front of this camera I'm going to test this thing's lens and the details of its Optical image quality separately for you all probably in a week or so when I finished writing up the review something I will note about the lens here is that it has an attachment thread hidden behind a metal ring at the front which lets you attach filter devices a hood or a wide angle or telephoto converter anyway back to the camera body itself and the first thing you notice is its lovely size and weight which have been refined over the years it feels much more substantial than your run-of-the-mill compact camera and looks more substantial also its metal build quality feels gorgeous but it's still easily small enough to fit into a pocket much thinner than virtually any other apsc camera and lens combination there's just enough of a hand grip to it to make it feel comfortable in your hands especially considering you can't really fit any big heavy lenses to it one fairly unique selling point of this whole series of cameras is Fuji's lovely hybrid viewfinder which works a lot like a rangefinder viewfinder letting you see a bit outside your final picture with a heads-up display and the ability to switch over to a completely electronic mode to view back your pictures virtually everyone will find it loads of fun and a unique experience to use as well as it offering a big Sharp image and the screen is excellent too very sharp and bright with accurate colors and it tilts up and down pretty far that makes it quick to use for Stills photography but a little less flexible for video work probably the right choice from Fuji for this kind of camera although you can't turn the screen around enough to easily take selfies not that the lens is really as wide as it should be for selfies ideally anyway when it comes to the cameras controls there are separate switches for auto manual and continuous Auto figur on the side as well as aperture control shutter speed ISO level and exposure compensation that makes the camera pretty fun to use orbe it's a little daunting for those still learning their photography Basics there's also a customizable control button on the top two pressable control Wheels one at the front and one in the rear as well as an interesting little spring-loaded custom switch to the front the smooth turning control ring on the edge of the lens is also customizable and of course when you're switched to manual focus mode it'll control your focus it can also be set to handle a camera's virtual Zoom mode which automatically crops into your image for a zoom effect but at increasingly lower resolutions in line with a camera sensor personally I prefer just to do my cropping and editing all that to say the camera just has loads of customizable nooks and crannies to disc discover about its person I wasn't a big fan of the camera's rear button layout to be honest the drive delete a and quick menu buttons are in kind of awkward spots especially that quick menu button which is something I want my thumb to easily find while shooting and the button is a bit too flush with the body to find easily as well I'd slightly question the need for a dedicated a e l AFL button although I concede that's just not part of my own everyday shooting what I'd love to have seen as a dedicated button for the Cam's awesome film simulations imagine that changing from velvia to across to Eternal bleach bypass in the Press of a button I think that would get people even more excited about Fuji's film simulations it's a big unique selling point of their cameras well to me anyway still once you get used to it the camera is fairly quick to handle and to use when you get used to it obviously the extra controls for shutter and ISO and aperture can slow you down a little but then again that's just part of the charm and even the intention of the camera's design the battery lasted about 400 shots for me so not bad for a camera of this type that battery compartment door doesn't open very easily when a camera is attached to a tripod annoying but not as critical a problem as it would be for a camera more intended for video work there is only one SD card slot on this camera I'd love to see Fuji adding another in the future even just an extra micro SD card slot like on a nickon ZF I'm just someone who loves the Peace of Mind of having a duplicate card and my camera for important jobs although of course the physical space in there is at a premium on the right hand side of the camera we also get a USBC connection for charging and general connections and a headphone adapter if you have one we also get a small microphone and remote port and a micro HDMI output which can be configured quite a bit in the camera's menu when it comes to high-speed shooting press the drive button and you can see all your options really clearly spelled out for you which is an excellent design touch from Fuji shooting with the electronic instead of the mechanical shutter will always give you better speeds and the camera can shoot up to 20 frames per second albeit with a 1.29 times crop and with a buffer that's not really very big still that's pretty fast and as a side note I absolutely love the quiet clicking noise of this camera's mechanical shutter it sounds spelt and absolutely beautiful the camera features a hot shoe on on the top and a not very powerful built-in flash at the front it has a bunch of shooting modes from simple things like Panorama HDR and multi-exposure modes to more complex options like uncompressed lossless confessed and confessed raw modes and heif shooting all of which help to futureproof this camera although goodness knows when heif files will finally end up taking off cosmetic picture effects includes skin smoothing a grain effect and of course Fuji famous and awesome film simulations over 20 of them this time I particularly enjoyed the classic Chrome Eterna Cinema and etera bleach bypass modes they look absolutely stunning if you choose the right mode for your shot and they really are a great selling point of Fuji cameras I think and I love shooting in across black and white modes with their various virtual color filters just wonderful now then autofocus it has a 425 Point intelligent hybrid autofocus system with machine learning for autofocus tracking so this is almost the best system Fuji have to offer nowadays the camera can autofocus quite quickly here as you can see although the lens emits a moderate wearing sound as it does so which is not so welcome new to the Mark 6 camera are subject tracking modes in Auto figus which work great although they're not so critical considering we're working with a wideangle lens here included our face and eye and Bird and Animal detection as well as well as multiple forms of motorized transport and the tracking speeds and stickiness are all customizable too here you can see the eye detection autofocus at work it's doing a great job in detecting my eyes as I walk around although the camera's autofocus motor can sometimes be a little bit slow and actually following me and catching up to me if I move around too quickly this is obviously not a camera for Sports Photography although Fuji have thrown in some helpful Sports features anyway such as shot burst shooting and flicker reduction which can admittedly be useful for other kinds of Photography the camera also has a built-in four-stop ND filter which can be turned on and off an uncommon feature which can be really useful for video work or long exposure photography and I'd like to see that feature in a lot more cameras to be honest the camera sensor is image stabilized as I mentioned before here is some footage with stabilization turned off and now turned on I found the stabilization worked fine for Stills photography but it could still be a bit wobbly for video work as you could see here when it comes to video modes the camera can shoot in 6.2k up to 30 frames per second for extra detail all the way down to 1080p but at a possible 240 frames per second and it's capable of shooting 10 bit footage and in h264 or h265 format so you have lots of options here I'll be looking at video quality more in a few minutes but your options here are very healthy all in all the camera is welld designed well customizable and packed with features and useful options Fuji are kind of throwing the kitchen sink at this one while still keeping well true to its X100 series Heritage unique features such as the hybrid viewfinder simply add to the fun in the future I'd love to see those rear controls having a bit of a redesign though as well as some kind of second memory card slot if Fuji can find room for it in there somewhere even just a little micro SD card slot would be better than nothing all right then image quality what can that 40 megap apsc sized sensor really do let's look at Raw versus jpeg resolution first raw images are absolutely packed with fine detail here although they do look just a little noisy Fuji's jpeg engine is doing an excellent job of maintaining a good detail of that fine detail while smoothing out any noise issues although in common with other Fuji cameras I still think it's slightly overshot openening the image just a little which leads to a striking picture but I'd appreciate just a little more subtlety to the contrast levels okay let's look at high ISO noise levels ISO 125 to 800 look fabulous here at ISO 1600 where starting to get just a little bit of squelchy and muddle on fine details but the image still looks pretty great ISO 3200 is starting to look pretty washed out though it'll be fine for smaller Prints but not so good for cropping I so 6400 is just about usable but ISO 12,800 is getting a bit too impressionistic for my taste not to mention noisy still considering it's a 40 megapixel apsc sensor this picture quality is perfectly reasonable I think in fact pretty good it's certainly a bit noisier than a lower resolution sensor might be but then again when scaled back the images will look about the same so it's definitely worth it for the higher possible detail in my opinion let's have just a quick look at dynamic range and when shooting in war it's actually very good with this camera as you can see here you can bring Shadow areas right up in editing and still get a reasonable image so if you're someone who's proficient in editing raw images then one option is to underexpose your image to preserve highlights then simply bring your shadows up that's about all I can say about still image quality and this is more of a Stills than a video camera but Fuji have packed it with high quality video modes nonetheless so let's see about video quality we'll start with the camera's highest resolution 6.2k video mode apologies for the slightly shaky footage here it was a windy day as you can see the 6.2k mode is packed with detail as you'd expect although some areas like the Rocks here can look a little blocky that sharpness remains excellent up to ISO 800 although ISO 1600 is really starting to lose out on finer details however as you can see here ISO 3200 and 6,400 are looking really washed out and ISO 12,800 is just a noisy mess well let's have a look now at the high quality 4K mode which is downsampled from 6.2k unsurprisingly the footage doesn't capture as much detail here but it's still looking very good for 4K High ISO noise levels stay about the same too with ISO 1600 again looking rather weak and 3200 and Beyond looking especially poor all right well let's try the standard quality 4K mode now I don't like it even at ISO 125 we're seeing some ugly video artifacts and Mo and less detail which again get worse at ISO 1600 and as you can see video quality is horrible at ISO 3200 and Beyond so the good news is that at anything up to ISO 800 the 6.2k and 4K high quality modes capture excellent footage with tons of detail but High ISO video footage especially ISO 1600 and higher looks poor so be sure to shoot subject in decent light here thankfully the lens's maximum aperture is as bright as F2 so it should let in enough light to help you along in getting decent footage here the camera also has a 240 frame per second high-speed mode which can be set to automatically slow your footage down in camera a feature I quite like it outputs to 1080p resolution that 200 140 frame per second footage is quite detailed not to mention enjoyable to use but unfortunately we're also seeing plenty of Mo here and video artifacts on contrasting edges so I wouldn't use this feature for critical professional video work or anything but it could be a fun feature for internet work a real issue with the video quality of this camera is rolling shutter though from 6.2k to 4K to 1080p mode as you can see any kind of panning and produces a crazy wobble effect duee to slow sensor redout and this will be a problem when doing still Sports Photography with the electronic shutter also so the camera captures loads of video detail but it'll certainly struggle with action video or with shooting in low light and well that's about it for this review as I mentioned before if you want to know a bit more about the optical performance of this camera's lens and whether it's really still suitable enough for 40 megap sensor then hold on as a video review of that is coming soon on this channel overall though a word I must have used about 50 times in this review so far is fun and that's simply because this is a deeply enjoyable camera to use in all kinds of different ways from its handy size beautiful build quality and quirky hybrid viewfinder down to the excellent quality its 40 megap stabilized sensor is able to provide and all the Myriad options and features and film simulations and video modes provide it in between between considering its small size this camera is just about jam-packed with everything you might want for Street casual and even more serious photography and what's more it's a considerable upgrade of the older Mark 5 model of the camera it's not perfect for example I can think of a few improvements to its button layout its menu system maybe could do of a bit of a refresh it can look a bit untidy in places and the camera's video quality is noisy at high isos among one or two other but it really is a blast to use and Fuji have done a beautiful job over the years of refining this camer series while not displacing what makes it so great and if you can cope with this camera's fixed lens and if your bank account is looking particularly healthy and if you can stomach the waiting time for availability then the camera certainly comes highly recommended for rich kids that is okay thanks for watching everyone 1,000 videos now that is crazy check out the playlists on my Channel that I recently sorted all those videos into for help navigating through them according to those playlists I've made 831 lens reviews on this channel so far 27 camera reviews and of course all kinds of other videos too I really need to get a life don't I thanks for all your support so far everyone and a special thanks to all my patreon supporters who keep this channel going sponsorship free check that out down in the description as patrons get all kinds of exclusive bonus content and early access to special reviews including this one ciao for now everyone

Channel: Christopher Frost

Views: 27,945

Keywords: lens, review, with, samples, sample, image, images, picture, pictures, quality, test, video, footage, still, stills, sharpness, distortion, vignetting, auto, focus, full, frame, full-frame, apsc, aps, aps-c, contrast, bokeh, speed, af, price, value, mirrorless, digital, slr, camera, fuji, x100, vi, x100vi, 100vi

Id: P4JVIo_CoY0

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024