DPReview Posts, After Much Ado, Its Fuji X10 Review

DPReview finally got its replacement Fuji X10 back and put it through the paces. It does as well as other reviews indicated that it would.

As with every Fuji camera, there are some pretty significant quirks. Autofocus is poor, software is odd, operational speed is hit-&-miss — you should be used to this by now. The biggest issue for me is the price. I do not think that it significantly outperforms the Canon G12, Panasonic LX-5, and Olympus XZ-1, yet it costs hundreds more. And with the Sony RX100 soon widely available, the X10 has been almost completely obviated. The one advantage that it holds is that the lens only drops to f/2.8 at the long end, which is impressive.

DPReview brings up a pretty big operational problem: RAW processing. When playing around with the Fuji X Pro 1, I was disappointed that shooting in RAW gave a performance hit. Only the Jpeg images were able to extract all of the detail that the sensor had to offer. Still, the differences were hard to notice most of the time.

That is not the case with the X10. Shooting RAW is literally not an option, at least not yet. The RAW files look like total crap. It's obvious that the processing software makers have not yet figured out what to do with Fuji's quirky sensor. You can shoot RAW and then process them in-camera — an increasingly popular feature — but no camera will ever come close to what is possible on a dedicated workstation.

I still kinda' want this camera. Just as I still kinda' want both the X100 and X Pro 1. For all of their problems, Fuji has injected a sense of romance and quality into their cameras that other companies just have not managed. I still won't buy it, since the Sony RX100 is a wildly more capable camera for only a bit more money, but I can't help but like this thing. As I have said with every camera that Fuji is making, I hope that they fix the problems in version 2, because I'll absolutely jump on board.