The racing red Fujifilm XF1 digital camera
Nobody invests in something just because it looks good, right? (If you're 63, paunchy and rich, and there's a busty 25-year-old blonde across the table from you as you read this, don't answer that).
But, as with Ferrari sports cars and almost anything Apple produce, there’s certainly some sort of marketing sense in designing an exterior that catches the eye even before anyone is aware of what a product is or isn’t capable of.
Fujifilm’s XF1 camera is a tribute to bygone elegance; to the shapes and textures that were in vogue before everything went all super-streamlined and shocking pink. It looks like a classic Leica SLR – perhaps the template for lovers of things on the high-quality end of photographic equipment – with the black casing replaced here by an attractive red panel (it’s also available in other colours).
It’s agreeably chunky – when you hold the camera, it feels substantial in your hand –and yet the XF1 is superbly portable. It’s very light, with the metal exterior being made out of aluminium.
The retro design extends to the lens arrangement, which may take some getting used to for photographers used to getting things rolling by simply pressing a button. If you’re the sort who feels you’re handy enough with technology to ignore instruction manuals, it may take you a couple of hours before you realise that, to turn on the XF1, you need to grab the lens casing and turn it a few degrees.
Once the lens is activated, it extends to the default focal length on its own, at which point many users will revert to expecting the camera to do what is now considered “normal” – in this case, autofocusing. That won’t happen, though, as you’ll need to co-ordinate extra muscles (remember doing this in the old days?) to manually change your subject from an unidentifiable blur into something recognisable.
For a while, the novelty of having a 12 megapixel digital camera that handles like an SLR from the eighties is wonderful, and the XF1 takes great pictures, displayed well on a good-sized screen. But the fiddliness of turning on the camera with the grasp-turn-lift function, and then the couple of seconds where you wait for autofocus and don’t get it means that capturing a moment that only lasts a moment is difficult. And if you want to use the camera to remember your daughter’s smile when she sees a birthday cake, that’s going to get frustrating.
The XF1 does all the other small camera stuff well indeed. It’s ironic, then, that it’s unique features are what might cause problems as well as encouraging you to buy it in the first place.
