As you’ve probably heard there’s been an awful lot of excitement over the last couple weeks with all of the CES announcements. Apparently mirrorless camera systems continue to generate a ton of buzz and this seems to be one of the fastest growing divisions within the camera industry at the moment.
I’ll have to say I hadn’t really been following a lot of these developments until recently and have been pretty surprised how quickly things are moving within this market.
Rarely do I get this excited about something especially within this area of cameras, but Fuji’s announcement of it’s new X-Pro1 this last week has made me sit up and pay attention.
Almost always I’m shooting with Canon DSLR’s, just because of the nature of my work, but there are times when a smaller walk around/travel camera would be great to have, especially something that has a larger sensor, great image quality, responsiveness, and an attractive design.
At least from the spec sheet it looks like Fuji has hit the nail on the head with some of the features photographers have been looking for in a camera of this class.
Here’s a brief rundown of it’s specs:
16mp, APS-C Sensor/No optical low-pass filter
Continuous Shooting 6fps
Optical/Electronic Hybrid Viewfinder
Video: 1920 x 1080 (24 fps), 1280 x 720 (24 fps)
3″ 1.23m dot LCD
On an interesting side note, Fuji is using a more complex proprietary sensor design that excludes the optical low-pass filter usually necessary for preventing color moire. Fuji claims that this design will provide more resolution, even out resolving Canon’s 5dmkII. We’ll have to wait and see on that one, but if true, it would be amazing.
The X-Pro1 will also be released with three new lenses. A 18mm f2, 35 1.4, and 60mm macro2.4. With the APS-C conversion factor, these lens focal lengths basically equate to a 28mm, 50mm, and a 90mm.
Personally I think the camera looks awesome. The cool retro design, premium build quality, and amazing spec sheet moves this into a more upper-level category. If it lives up to what they’re claiming, I can see this camera not only being a major hit with enthusiasts and professionals, but also really shaking things up in the industry.
dpreview.com has a nice preview you can check out here.
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