Fuji x100 disappointment, Part 2

Apparently I hit a nerve with my previous post scathing the Fujifilm x100. It seems there are many fans who have taken it as a personal insult that I am not happy with their choice of camera. It was even pointed out that the very famous Zack Arias is in love with the x100. I went to his blog to read about about it. Turns out he has encountered many of the same issues that I have; these are direct quotes from his review:

• "Fuji x100 can be a complete pain in the ass to use"
• "You have to get used to it’s quirks (menus, focusing, paralax, start up time, lock ups, etc.)"
• "The x100 can be a complete pain in the ass of a camera."
• "Another massively annoying “feature” of this camera is focusing at close range"
• "The x100 has a manual focusing ring on the lens and let me state for the record that with the first firmware it was the worst manual focusing of any camera ever made in all of the world."

The biggest difference is that he loves the image quality so much that working with a difficult to use camera is worth it, while for me it is not. Although I am nowhere near as accomplished of a photographer as Zach, I have been shooting semi-professionally for over 20 years. In short, I didn't fall off the photography wagon yesterday and start making wild claims today, and my first camera wasn't digital.

What it boils down to for me is the old design adage that form follows function. I think that Fuji engineers spent too much time working on the form, and not enough time talking to photographers. Frankly I would much rather have an ugly camera that's easy to use. Maybe that's why I like the Panasonic GF-1 so much, and why I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing the GX-1 when it comes out. There's obviously a difference, but the Four Thirds chip isn't that much smaller than APS-C.

Below are samples from the GF-1

 

Panoramas are easy enough to do on the GF1, just take a bunch of shots and seam them up in Photoshop, this is 4 horizontal frames stitched together: