The first thing I noticed about the Fujifilm X Half is just how small and light it is. The camera is designed to give you no excuses — you should be able to bring it with you everywhere. And after spending a few hours walking around LA with the camera, I’m starting to understand why you’d want to.
Fujifilm’s latest doesn’t necessarily impress on paper. The X Half is an $850 camera with a vertically oriented 1-inch sensor capable of taking 18MP photos. There’s no electric or hybrid viewfinder, no stabilization, no hot shoe, and it can’t even take RAW photos. It’s very easy to look at that list of missing features and disregard the camera altogether.
But the X Half’s simplicity is very much the point. This is a camera for taking scrappy, quick photos and capturing memories. A lot of its flaws are masked with film simulations, filters, and superimposed grain. Its limitations are a feature, not a bug.
The camera comes with a fixed 32mm equivalent f/2.8 lens. Even with all the added grain and filters turned off, I found it to perform very well. The dynamic range is acceptable with natural highlight falloff, edges are sharp, and there’s even some bokeh if you plan accordingly. But I didn’t want to take those kinds of photos with this camera.
Fujifilm loaded the X Half with a number of its most popular film simulations, which mimic the look of classic films, and it also added a bunch of new filters. There’s halation, mirror mode (throwback to Apple’s Photo Booth, anyone?), selective color, dynamic tone, fish eye, and so much more. Some of these are downright silly, but some are endearing and whimsical. My favorite was the light leak. It adds light leaks to your photos in a random fashion, so you never know what you’ll get until after you shoot.
On the top of the camera is something unique: a digital “film advance” lever. Cranking the lever is integral to two of the camera’s new features, 2-in-1 diptychs and film mode.
Diptychs let you merge two images side by side. This feature makes a whole lot more sense in a film camera, but Fujifilm is trying to replicate the idea for a digital world. You start a diptych by cranking the lever like you would on a film camera. (Although unlike a film camera, a digital camera can also record a video, so that can now be part of your diptych, too.)
Then there’s film mode, which is designed to more closely mimic an analog camera. It basically locks you out of using modern features and moving too quickly. There’s no way to preview your shot on the main screen, you’re forced to crank the lever to advance your imaginary film before taking the next photo, you’re locked into a specific look until you’ve finished your “roll,” and there’s no way to play back the photos you’ve just taken either. It is easily my favorite mode here because it strips so much of what we’re used to with digital cameras and makes us use this camera entirely differently.
This mode perfectly encapsulates why I don’t mind the exclusion of an electric viewfinder. Using the optical one in this mode makes you guess your composition and your framing, and you simply won’t know the results until you’re done with your whole roll. Once you’re done, the digital roll “rewinds” and you can look at your photos in the app. Unfortunately the app isn’t finalized and wasn’t available during my demo, but the files are still saved on the SD card.
The only immediate negative, no pun intended, I have noticed so far is that the camera just feels a bit slow. Despite using a fairly fast SD card, write speeds seemed slow and took me out of the moment more than a few times. Creating a diptych with a photo and a video took a long time to save onto the SD. It also slowed me down when using Film mode, where you have to “advance the film” after each shot. I found myself having to wait for the previous photo to save before cranking the lever.
Even the main touchscreen, which is largely how you interact with this camera, wasn’t as responsive as I’d want it to be. There are two screens on the back — a pill-shaped screen that lets you choose film sims and navigate menus, and a vertical screen for changing settings and previewing images. Some inputs weren’t registering even after a few attempts, and I wasn’t the only one at the camera event with the same issue.
Despite those issues, I thoroughly enjoyed my brief time with the camera and was frequently delighted by the clever ideas the Fujifilm team implemented here. I hope to see more companies making bold decisions with hardware and software like this that alter the experience of using the camera.
There are far more capable cameras at a similar price point. But if you’re looking for something refreshing and joyful, the X Half is shaping up to be a brilliant little camera.
