Product managers at Nikon and Canon must be getting pretty worried about their bonuses right now – First of all they’re still being squeezed by cellphone cameras at the low end, and now even their high-end compacts look absurd in the face of Fujifilm’s latest offering, the X-A1. It’s a camera which costs around the same as Nikon’s P and Canon’s G cameras ($600), only it comes with an APS-C sensor and an interchangeable lens.
I have a hard time coming up with a reason to buy something like a Canon G15. The iPhone 5s has a sensor size that’s creeping up to catch the small sensor in the G15, and the new X-A1 has a huge DSLR-sized sensor in a tiny body, and you can change the lenses. There are use cases for a well-specced and rugged compact, but they’re rapidly shrinking.
The X-A1 has a regular sensor, not the magic X-Trans that other new Fujifilm cameras use, and it clocks in at 16MP, a tilting 3-inch LCD screen, manual knobs and dials and a lens mount that’ll take Fujifilm’s excellent X-Series lenses. And it comes with a Fujinon XC16–50mm (24–76mm equivalent) ƒ3.5–5.6 lens, which is a little pedestrian in term of light-gathering capabilities, but probably takes a nice picture.
This means that you can out great lenses on a cheap body, and it also means that you can use those lenses on more expensive Fujifilm cameras in the future.
Fujifilm seems to be tag-teaming with Apple to squeeze the air out of the camera market, clotheslining the entire thing from cheap-o low-end right up to “pro-sumer” DSLRs, leaving the unprofitable high-end for the likes of Nikon and Canon.
It’ll be interesting to see if they can recover, or if they become niche makers catering to the specialized pro market. In the meantime, I’ll be shooting with my iPhone and my Fujifilm X100S.
Source: DP Review
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
One response to “Fujifilm X-A1, A Lens-Swapping APS-C Camera For The Price Of A Compact”
The Panasonic GX1 is a pretty good Compact System Camera in it’s own right with a bevy of very high quality lenses to choose from. I’m with you though, I use my iPhone and my GX1 to take most of my photos.