By Andrew Liszewski
‘Tis the season for new camera announcements, and if you’ve drooled over the retro charms of Leica’s P&S digicams but scoffed at their price, FujiFilm might have an alternative for you. Their FinePix X100 will officially be available in our neck of the woods come March for $1,199.95, and while expensive, it’s still thousands of dollars cheaper than Leica’s offerings. But what does your grand+ get you? Well besides the magnesium alloy body and “leather-like” accents, the X100 boasts a 12.3MP APS-C CMOS sensor, a fixed non-swappable 23mm F2 lens and an ISO range of 200 to 6400, which can be expanded to 100 and up to 12,800 as needed.
Round back you’ll find a healthy 2.8-inch LCD display sporting a 1,440,000 dot high-res image for framing or reviewing shots, but that can be switched off in lieu of using the X100’s classic optical viewfinder. They can even be used together in a hybrid fashion for showing additional shooting data on the LCD whilst framing through the viewfinder. If video is important to you there’s an acceptable 720P ‘HD’ movie mode that can capture clips using the camera’s aperture-priority mode for pleasantly defocused backgrounds, and an HDMI Mini port allows you to connect it directly to a hi-def TV. And for you Hipstamatic lovers, the X100 even has FujiFilm’s ‘Film Simulation Modes’ which makes your photos look like they were shot with the company’s Velvia, PROVIA and ASTIA color reversal film stocks.
