I'm not loyal to any particular brand of camera. I've used Sony (my first digital camera ever), Canon, Leica and Nikon, among others. Not that I have many cameras; I always trade them in and I've never had more than two at the same time (unless you count the cameras in my phone and iPad, and I don't because I almost never use them). My friends find it amusing how often I switch cameras, but to me it's just like guitars, or stereos. Some people like to mix it up and see what's out there, while others find what for them is ideal and never use anything else.

Anyway. The newest entry to my lineup is the recently-released Fuji X-Pro 1, a camera which has produced some pretty interesting reviews, many of which have said, in so many words, "It makes me want to smash it against a wall.....it's incredible". The general gist of the reviews is that the image quality produced by this camera is astonishing, but that it has major issues with usability. I'm not particularly bothered by hard-to-use cameras; I had a Leica M8 which was harder to predict than the stock market, and I still have a Digilux 2 which has what must be the worst EVF (electronic viewfinder) in the history of mankind and autofocus so slow that I could probably sketch the scene before it locked on. So I traded in my workhorse Nikon D7000 and lenses (the nice thing about DSLRs is that almost without exception they drop in price like crazy, so it's no real hardship to get another one later), and picked up the X-Pro 1 with the 35mm 1.4 lens about which most reviewers have said very nice things. There's also a somewhat expensive adaptor out there which will let you use what many people consider the holy grail of 35mm photography lenses, the Leica M series. Might have to look into that a little later.

I do have a little experience with Fuji. I had the X100, which some consider the "predecessor" to the X-Pro 1, and while it took nice pictures I couldn't get along with it. The X-Pro 1, though, is a different beast and so I wanted to give it a go.

Here's what I've got from it so far...

The colours are nuts. This is on "standard" mode, and the X-Pro 1 has modes which push them significantly further.  I've boosted them a bit in post, but even straight out of the camera they are very impressive.

Like the Leica M8 and M9, the X-Pro 1 has no anti-aliasing filter, meaning that in theory the pictures should be sharper than your typical camera. You'd have to zoom right in on it to see, but it's certainly very sharp and very detailed. GIve the sharpness a boost in Lightroom and you're looking at cutting yourself on the files.

Did I mention the colours? I boosted the green and modified the blue, but only a little. This is not far from the out-of-camera JPEG.

If you zoomed right in on the clock, you'd see how sharp and detailed this file is.

OK, I post-processed this one a fair bit, but I like the result, especially the reflection.

The X-Pro 1 has Fuji's rather brilliant hybrid viewfinder, which combines an optical and electronic viewfinder ( you switch between them with a lever on the front of the camera). I don't have much experience with EVFs, but the one I do have experience of is the Digilux 2 which is so bad that I can't think of a metaphor or simile to describe it. The X-Pro 1's seems more than acceptable (and in comparison to the Digilux 2, miraculous). If you're going to shoot wide open at a close distance like in this shot, the electronic viewfinder is a good way to make sure that a) you're not too close and b) you've hit the focus dead on. This was auto, but manual is also possible and from the few times I've used it thus far it's nowhere near as horrible as people have said. It's not like manually focusing a rangefinder, but it's entirely acceptable.

This was EVF too, wide open  and manual focusing to get the details on the tree bark. Added some sharpening in Lightroom. Nice bokeh!

The X-Pro 1 is not really designed to be a sports camera, but you can get away with it if you know what you're doing. Prefocus on the spot where the action's going to happen and then it's all down to timing. It does have a 6fps burst mode, but doesn't do continuous tracking so well, so it's better to assume you have one chance to nail it and work on that assumption.

One more action shot

The other thing getting raves is the high ISO performance of the X-Pro 1. Haven't had that much time to test it out, but this is ISO 5,000 and it looks pretty impressive.

Should be a lot more to come from this camera, so keep your eyes peeled!

Thanks for looking, feel free to comment.