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A year with the Fuji X-E1 | Nils Pickert

It’s nearly a year ago I bougt the Fuji X-E1. I took about 11.000 pho­tos with it in the last year, so it’s time for a resumee how it is working.

Before I mostly took pho­tos with a Canon 50Dwith a couple of lenses, namely a Sigma 10–20, a Canon 17−55÷2.8, a 50/1.8 and a 70−200÷2.8. The 70–200 mostly stayed at home because it was too heavy. The rest was car­ried around every hol­i­day, using mostly the 17–55, some­times the 10–20. The cam­era is great, the lenses are good, but it is heavy stuff and being past 30 it got on my back. So I decided to try the Fuji X-E1 and only the 18-55mm Kit lens for a start. It was sup­posed to become a light travel cam­era, used when I did not want to carry the heavy machinery. It turned out to be the best cam­era I have used since the days of film. I immedeately liked the way you set up stuff: there is a time dial, aper­ture is set via a dial at the lense and that’s it. Auto ISO or just fixed ISO is selec­ted via the eas­ily access­ible Q-Menu. The set­tings you change are all included in the Q-Menu, access­ible with a simple key press. In the begin­ning Auto­fo­cus was slow. Pain­fully slow. And then the firm­ware updates came in. Kai-Zen at it’s finest, Fuji seems to really care about the cus­tom­ers who already bought a cam­era. New firm­ware for the lenses, new firm­ware for the cam­era. And each time it improved some­thing, not only some new fea­ture nobody needed. Except one thing (the beep at the last update) everything improved with an update. In the mean­time the Kit Lens has been joined by the 14/2.8 from Fuji and by an older Canon FD 55/1.2 with an adapter. I some­times miss a tele­photo lens and star­ted think­ing about the 50–200 from Fuji. But on the other hand, I rarely use a tele. The X-E1 has been with me in a lot of situ­ations I would not have car­ried the Canon gear. Using only the kit lens cov­ers about 90% of my pho­to­graphy needs. The wide angle is nice, but with the pan­or­ama func­tion most of the time you do not even need a wide angle……

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