It’s 2023
It’s been a loooooong time since I posted anything. I’m still out here taking photos though. I recently picked up a new camera body and a new lens, so I’ve been shooting a little less with the X100V.
I’m going to go into a little tangent here, but back in 2022, I noticed there seemed to be a tiny piece of dust on the image sensor of my X100V. I have the accessories on my X100V to make it qualify as “weatherproof”, but apparently it wasn’t enough to keep that tiny piece of dust out. Anyway, I didn’t really know of a way to get the piece of dust off of the sensor, so I sent it into FujiFilm. I knew they’d have to disassemble the camera to give it a thorough cleaning, and I figured that wasn’t a completely simple task. However, I was a little surprised when the quote for the cleaning came back at $842.83! That’s like 60% of the original cost of the camera. I almost considered just telling them to keep it and buying a new one, but X100Vs are pretty hard to find in stock anywhere. So I got it cleaned, but it really made me think twice about purchasing another fixed-lens camera in the future. I suppose this is something to keep in mind if you are reading this and thought you might have an X100V in your own future.
Anyway, that experience didn’t totally sour things between me and FujiFilm. I picked up an X-H2S and it’s a great camera. I have some gripes with it, but overall, it’s sort of a beast. I do miss some of the manual dials from the X-T series, but I’m quickly learning to live without them. My main gripe is that you can’t assign ISO to the front or rear dials. Since I’m setting aperture on the lens, I always liked having shutter speed on one dial and ISO on the other. Typically I know what shutter speed and aperture I want to shoot with pretty quickly, and then I like to dial in the ISO to get the exposure I’m visualizing. But with the X-H2S, I have to press the ISO button, use the D-pad to select ISO and hit OK to lock it in. During this process, everything but the image the camera is seeing disappears from the viewfinder (exposure level, etc.). I’m hoping FujiFilm will consider adding ISO as a dial option in one of their future updates. And I probably just need to read the manual more, but I find it odd that I’ll pick one of the custom settings that I’ve created (C1 for instance), and if I make a change while shooting on that custom setting (like changing shutter speed) and then switch to another setting (C2) and switch back to C1, it doesn’t revert back to what I originally saved. It holds onto what I last changed the settings to (but didn’t really “save” them anywhere). Not really a big deal, but it’s something I’m still getting used to.
EDIT (5/26/2023): It looks like FujiFilm added the ability to adjust ISO on the fly with the dials in the latest firmware (5.00) which was released on 5/24/2023. What could possibly be my biggest gripe with the camera is now fixed!
Anyway, here’s some photos over the last year or so lol.
