One of my goals set in the New Year’s blog was to buy a Leica camera; at that time, there weren’t many choices available, only the Q2. This year the Q3 was released, priced at fifty thousand, and the Q2 didn’t see much of a price drop, with gray market new units still costing over thirty thousand. Previously, seeing that two-thirds of the year had already passed and that thirty thousand yuan was beyond my spending capability, my teammate happened to be interested in trying out a zoom lens, which shifted our attention to Fujifilm. The new models with interchangeable lenses were the XT5 and XS20, both of which were out of stock in flagship stores.
Today, Fujifilm products are so hyped up that they’re out of stock everywhere; even official distributors require a premium to purchase, and unofficial dealers are marking up prices outrageously. Taking the size into consideration, I still chose the XS20, and when purchasing, I paired it with an XF18 f1.4 lens, about which I have already written a brief initial user experience.
The most surprising aspect upon getting my hands on it was the size—it’s even a bit smaller than the X100V. Such a compact body with image stabilization really brings to mind the style of the previous Olympus cameras. It has the latest generation processor, and the autofocus is quite good. Although it doesn’t have a 40-million-pixel sensor, for me, it’s sufficient.
Pros
- 5th generation processor with great autofocus.
- Large battery, really good battery life.
- Extremely compact size, and the weight is also nice.
- Has image stabilization.
- Object auto detection works well.
- Video capabilities are quite impressive.
Cons
- Lacks a focus joystick.
- Fewer buttons and dials make it inconvenient to switch settings.
- It’s not an all-weather body.
- Feels quite plasticky.
- Beauty mode can only be used in auto mode.
Conclusion
High ISO performance on the APS-C sensor is not great; I can accept up to ISO 1600, but when shooting RAW, you can push the ISO a bit higher and fix it up with Lightroom’s AI noise reduction; it’s still usable, just lacking a bit in terms of feel.
