Defining a brand
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The Fujifilm Finepix X100 was the company’s first large-sensor compact, and helped define the X series that sprang from it. As a result, understanding the X100 VI’s history helps us understand the brand.
In the noughties, Fujifilm had become known for its long-zoom ‘bridge’ compacts. But in the face of a price war, it wanted to remind people that it was also a world leader in broadcast lenses and a brand that understood photography.
Sigma and then Leica had already introduced large sensor fixed lens cameras, but neither of them mimicked the look or style of the fixed lens rangefinders that had been popular in the ’60s and ’70s. As befits its role in helping Fujifilm pivot from mass-market compacts to aspirational products for photographers, the original X100 still wore the outgoing ‘Finepix’ name. But it would soon become clear that the X series had arrived.
Finepix X100 – Dec 2010
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It’s fair to say Fujifilm got a lot right with the original X100, in that its core concepts: an APS-C sensor, fixed 35mm equiv F2 lens, hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder and classic rangefinder styling have remained central to the series ever since.
The first model was built around a 12MP APS-C sensor that had been appearing in cameras for three years already. Its viewinder used a 1.44M dot LCD and the rear screen was a fairly modest 2.8″.
There’s also a lot the company got wrong. At launch the X100 was slow, laggy and exhibited such a list of quirks and inconsistent behaviours that our intrepid reviewer tried to detail them all. If you look back at the review, some of those early foibles were noted to have been addressed through a series of firmware updates.
X100S – Jan 2013
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The X100S (‘S’ for ‘second’ ) included a combination both of significant upgrades and subtle refinements: a trend that will continue throughout the series.
The biggest change was the move to a 16MP sensor, which had a significance far beyond the change of resolution. The most obvious was that it adopted the X-Trans color filter array Fujifilm had introduced in the X-Pro1, the year earlier. It was also the first to include on-sensor phase detection elements in a square array in the middle of the chip. And perhaps least obviously, it was one of the first chips to employ a column-parallel ADC design, slashing the read noise and dramatically boosting the dynamic range.
Ironically, along with the move to this higher DR sensor, Fujifilm adjusted the tone curves of its film simulations with its second-generation cameras, clipping the shadows earlier, and with a more aggressive transition into the blacks.
Alongside the big changes, Fujifilm also tweaked details such as button behavior: the MF/AF switch was rearranged to put AF-C in the hardest-to-set central position. A more precise rotation sensor was added to the manual focus ring, and the button that had to be pressed to move the AF switch was moved from the left of the camera to the top of the four-way controller.
The LCD panel in the viewfinder also got a resolution bump, up to 2.36M dots (1024 x 768 pixels). And, if you look closely, the little self-timer style lever on the front of the camera was refined to reflect the fact it only flicked in one direction.
Between the launch of the original camera and the arrival of the X100S, Fujifilm launched the X-T1 and, along with it, a pair of additional film simulation modes: Pro Neg Hi and Pro Neg Std.
Fujfilm X100 Firmware 2.01 – October 2013
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A noteworthy update to the series occurred in October 2013 with the release of firmware v2.00 and 2.01 for the original X100. These updates improved the camera’s focus performance to a degree that’s rare, and perhaps even unprecedented.
The other aspect that was so unusual was not just that this radically better firmware arrived nearly three years into the X100’s life, but that it came around nine months after the camera had been discontinued and superseded. Of course, the very nature of a move being unprecedented is that it can appear to then set a new precedent: the previously unheard of risking becoming the expected. Future models would frequently receive updates, but none would have such a profound impact.
X100T – September 2014
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The X100T arrived just twenty months after the launch of the second camera. The resolution stayed at 16MP but there were plenty of other changes. The hybrid viewfinder gained a pop-up tab that allows an electronic preview to be projected into the corner of the optical view. The small self-timer style switch on the front of the camera was made into a two-way switch to accommodate this change, and its design changed again.
The press toggle on the back of the camera was replaced with a pressable dial and the combined four-way controller/dial was replaced with four large, directional buttons. This presented the third means of setting the AF point in as many cameras, but also give the camera up to seven customizable buttons. The X100T also saw the arrival of Wi-Fi to the series.
The rear screen grew from 2.8 and 3.0 diagonal inches and the resolution jumped from 460k dots to 1.04M dots: a 50% resolution increase in each dimension, taking it up to 720 x 480px. The exposure comp dial was extended, allowing a correction of up to 3 stops in each direction. All relatively minor adjustments in themselves, but contributing to a much more polished, usable camera.
The X100T added the ‘Classic Chrome’ film simulation, another instance of a mode that didn’t necessarily try to mimic one of the company’s own filmstocks.
X100F -Jan 2017
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The fourth iteration of the camera saw the sensor resolution increased to 24MP, giving an appreciable improvement in the output quality. The higher resolution meant there was less likely to be a need to zoom in to 100% but improved processing, particularly on the part of third-party software makers, reduced the likelihood of ‘worm’-like patterns appearing in the X-Trans images.
The camera also adopted a new battery, with the voltage increasing to 7.2V and the capacity to 8.7Wh, up from 6.2Wh. This not only increased battery life but also helped boost the camera’s focus speed.
In terms of ergonomics, the fourth camera gained an AF joystick (yet another change in terms of AF point selection method), which alleviated any tension between the need to position the AF point and the available custom buttons. Further direct control was added by finally giving a dedicated control for ISO.
We found the dial-within-a-dial implementation as fiddly as it was pretty, and felt its film-era design wasn’t perhaps best suited to a camera on which you might change ISO shot-to-shot, less still one with three Auto ISO presets you might wish to switch between. But it was an undoubtedly attractive implementation, and on a camera as style-forward as the X100, that’s likely to have been just as significant for at least some of the buyers.
The X100F saw the arrival of Acros, a finely detailed black-and-white mode (with three color-filter simulating variations).
X100V – Feb 2020
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The X100V (pronounced as ‘five’ according to Fujifilm) was perhaps the most significant single step forward for the X100 series, in that it saw the arrival of a new lens. The original was notorious for its softness at close distances, particularly at wide apertures. The new design improved things in this regard, while continuing to keep the camera small. Noticeably, it also appeared to favor size and sharpness over speed. Elsewhere in the X series, Fujifilm was moving to using small internal focus elements or powerful linear motors to boost the speed of its newer lenses, but the X100V stayed true to the original design priorities.
The ‘V’ also saw a redesign of the optical/electronic viewfinder. There was a higher resolution panel (1280 x 960 pixels) and a shift across to the brighter OLED display technology that had come to dominate the rest of the market. There was a concurrent reworking of the way the bright lines and focus points were displayed in the finder’s optical mode. Thankfully Fujifilm listened to the concerns of existing X100 users and provided the option to mimic the original behavior with its v2.0 firmware update more closely.
But the changes went deeper than this. The X100V was the first in the series to offer a touchscreen, and the first whose screen could tilt out away from the body. The company has subsequently told us it received equal amounts of feedback calling for and against this feature, and appears to have waited until it could be implemented without undue impact on the size or handling of the camera. The most significant knock-on effect was the removal of the camera’s four-way controller, with a slightly clunky series of directional swipes of the touchscreen attempting to make up for the loss of customizable buttons.
With all this going on, the move to the 26MP BSI CMOS sensor was a relatively minor change. It brought with it the excellent video capabilities of the X-T3, but it’s hard to say how many users will have noticed. Arguably the addition of the muted, video-friendly Eterna film simulation was a more significant advance for most users. Classic Neg was added in the same iteration.
The X100 goes viral
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Interestingly, despite the series having by this stage established a decade-long reputation amongst photographers from keen amateurs all the way up to the starry likes of Annie Leibovitz, the X100V became the unexpected focus of attention when a younger generation of users discovered the camera through TikTok. Well into its lifecycle, and with Fujifilm presumably winding down its production, the camera became a sell-out success, meaning the company suddenly found itself with another cohort it had to listen to and appease with its future developments.
X100VI – Feb 2024
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Which brings us up to the present. Despite the longest gap yet between updates, the X100VI isn’t as radical an update as its predecessor. But the addition of in-body stabilization is a big step forward, nonetheless. Our early impressions are that it, along with the revised lens from the previous version, help make the most of the move to a 40MP sensor.
Some of the updates: subject recognition autofocus for instance, may prove significant while others, such as 6.2K video capture and tap-to-track in video feel more like the incidental byproduct of developments that will have more impact elsewhere in the X series. This may well also be true of the camera-to-cloud system for uploading the Adobe’s Frame.io collaboration platform, but we’ll reserve judgment on that until we see how it’s received by the TIkTok creators and influencers that Fujifilm is no doubt hoping to court.
As has been the case throughout this story, the X100VI also includes some small tweaks that make the camera better: a redesigned tilt screen mechanism better accommodates both waist-level and overhead shooting, for example.
And, as before, the latest X100 gains all the film simulations that Fujifilm had developed since the last release. In this instance,, Reala ACE, Nostalgic Neg and Eterna Bleach Bypass. How many of these updates are made available to other X series cameras will be taken as a test of Fujifilm’s commitment to supporting its existing users. But looking back at the X100 series, there’s a story of cameras that have been improved and refined in their lifetimes but within a series where each camera represents an improvement on what the prior model could deliver.
Read our X100VI initial review
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This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
