First impressions

The new toy

Having taken the plunge yesterday, and spending some time familiarising myself with the controls, I had my first chance to try my new toy out this afternoon. That's it on the right, a Fuji X10.

Is it the future? Not yet it ain't. For what it is, a souped-up compact it's really good. As a functional camera it relies too much on menus for my liking, although I'm sure that with familiarity I'll get it set to a way that suits me. The viewfinder will take some getting used to. At least with it only giving a partial view of what appears on screen parallax isn't too much of a problem, and with 12mp to play with images can be cropped back without too much loss of image size.

Macro setting

There are some features I really like. The macro capability is great, and I can see it providing me with some interesting images when I get to grips with it. The small sensor's depth of field lends itself to close-up shooting.

I also like the size of the camera. It's unobtrusive in the extreme. It's also very quiet, and can be switched to a silent mode.

My first digital camera, all 1.3mp of it's sensor, was a Fuji as was my second. When I bought my third, a canon S3IS, I wasn't as keen on the colours it produced. The X10 makes as lovely pictures as my previous Fujis did. So that's nice.

All in all I find it hard to fault the files, JPEGs at this stage, that I've got. Had I gone straight from the S3IS to the X10 I would have been overjoyed and thought I'd reached Nirvana. But having got used to full frame Nikon files I have become spoiled. These are nice, but there is something about full frame that gives a different look to the pictures. It's hard to define, but it's definitely there.

However, this camera isn't a DSLR. It's a different tool for a different job. It's for taking fishing when I need to cut down on gear, and for taking round town, and anywhere else I go, where a DSLR draws attention to you. It'll get used a fair bit.

I do miss framing through a viewfinder, although it was better than squinting at the screen this afternoon in the bright sunshine when the screen was hard to see clearly. Nor do I like the arm's length hold when framing with the screen, but it has the advantage of making you look like a happy snapper.

It was fun wandering around for an hour or so seeing what the camera can do. It can do a lot.

A square crop seemed to suit this shot

I'm not sure about the native 4:3 aspect ratio in general, but it worked for this shot. Lovely blues and yellow.

A shot 'from the hip'

This current trend towards smaller sensors is not the way forward for me. They are good, and getting better, but they are being driven by a fad for making cameras as small as possible in order to compete with the ever improving phone-cameras. The technology must surely be available to put a large sensor in a small body with an integral viewfinder and simple analog controls.

No doubt I'll have more adventures from compact camera land anon.

---