It’s hard not to feel jealous as, one by one, all my colleagues ditched their old cameras for Fujifilm bodies. The gorgeous retro styling, compact size and analog film simulations are all reasons to fall deeply in love with their models. Not to mention, when you’re toting around a decade-old Olympus to events, the ability to charge a camera via USB-C makes me delirious.
Which is why I think it’s time to join the gang, and I’m hoping someone will bring me an X-T50 for the holidays. It’s the latest entrant in Fujifilm’s middle-tier range, with the high-end features I’m looking for on a slightly more affordable package. It carries the same 40.2-megapixel sensor, 6K 30p video and in-body stabilization you’d find on the high-end X-T5.
Fujifilm knows the target market for the X-T50 wants to make full use of those film simulations and has added them to one of the top dials. If you’re out and about, and want to tweak how an image looks, you can turn the wheel to see what looks best before you start snapping. I’m a big fan of the physical controls, too, rather than burying everything in tedious digital submenus.
So, I borrowed an X-T50 for two weeks to see if the reality matched up to all of the hype both online, and with my colleagues. The learning curve is pretty steep, and you’ll need to quickly marshal all of the different controls to get things working. There are still some key things buried deep in the digital menus, like ensuring the in-body OIS is always enabled.
But that’s where the bad stuff ends, because the photos this thing produces are gorgeous. I’ve taken some pretty spectacular portraits, landscape and architecture shots and I feel like this is the camera I should have started my photography journey with. There’s so much to control, and so much to do, that you feel enormously enabled by what it has to offer. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Santa, or an itinerant billionaire, drops one off at my door this holiday season. — Daniel Cooper, Senior Reporter