I ended up at Vlad Dodan’s blog after following a link to his hands-on preview of the Fuji X-Pro1. Not many people have had a chance to shoot with one, so I found this of particular interest. It’s a good read, so you should check it out if you’re generally interested in the camera. If you’ve been reading me, you’ll know that I’m worried that the Fuji’s AF won’t be up to snuff. Here’s what Vlad had to say about it:
Auto-focus speed was decent. Not Nikon V1 fast but not too slow either. My biggest problem with the AF isn’t the speed though. It’s the fact that it hunts, and misses quite allot, if you’re looking through the viewfinder. If you’re using the back LCD it gets considerably better. (Still hunts but at least you can see if you have your subject in focus or not)
That sounds like the X100 to me, and it was a deal-breaker. There’s some really good stuff in there, too:
The viewfinder is the main character of the show and If you loved the one on the X100, the new (v.2) will bring you joy.
That’s great, since I thought the viewfinder was one of the best things about the X100, so I’m happy to read this. These days, I’ve pretty much decided that I’m not going to be in the market for the Fuji, though. Not because I bought the V1, but because the Fuji is too big. I think that for me to buy another system, it’s going to have to be either significantly smaller than my Nikon DSLR system, or significantly better. Sounds like the Fuji has a way to go on either score, but I’m super-happy to see that they’re trying, and I think they’ll have a lot of success going the route they’re headed.
I decided to poke around on Vlad’s blog a bit, since I’d never read it before. It turns out that he also did a preview of the Nikon 1 V1 that I find to be accurate and fair. I can’t tell from the post when it was published, but if it was near the launch, that’s a lot better than how most people were reacting to the Nikon 1 system at the time.