Fujifilm X-T1 review

Other photographic functions aren’t neglected. There are six buttons – one on the front, another on the top and the four-way rear pad – that can be assigned to any of 17 functions such as white balance, autofocus area, self-timer and JPEG/RAW quality. The front button is the natural home for depth-of-field preview, but we weren’t so keen on its latching on/off implementation, especially as it only responded as we released the button. Various additional controls are available on a four-by-four grid via the Q button. The main menu is neatly arranged but there’s little cause to visit it in everyday use.

We do have a few quibbles with the design. The 350-shot battery life is quite short for such as expensive camera, although a larger one would inevitably have increased the camera’s size. Spares are available for around £45. We suspect there might have been room to squeeze an integrated flash into the viewfinder hump, though. The bundled external unit diminishes the elegant design and is likely to be left at home. The four-way pad on the rear has a low profile and can be a little fiddly. These aren’t major complaints, though.

Fujifilm X-T1 Focus and Performance

The massive viewfinder plays an important role in delivering one of the best manual focus experiences we’ve seen from a digital camera. There’s an AF Lock button which invokes the autofocus even when the front dial is set to manual focus – a handy shortcut for quickly getting into the right ball park. Then there’s a Focus Assist button, which enlarges the centre of the frame to enable fine adjustments. Focus peaking is available, highlighting sharply contrasted (and thus, focused) parts of the frame. Fujifilm has also included its Digital Split Image mode that we first saw on the Fujifilm X100S. This draws on the phase-detect autofocus points that are built into the sensor to inform the camera how much different parts of the scene are out of focus by. This is represented on the screen by dividing the image into horizontal strips, and these strips only line up when the subject is in focus.

Phase detection also helps with autofocus performance. We measured times of between 0.3 and 0.7 seconds to focus and capture a shot, with 0.4 seconds being typical. Shot-to-shot performance in normal use came in at 0.7 seconds. These are solid results, but not outstanding. Continuous mode was far more impressive, delivering speeds up to 6.3fps with tracking autofocus. This lasted for 40 JPEGs or 20 RAW frames before slowing to the speed of the card. Continuous shooting with fixed focus was even faster, at 8.3fps. This level of performance compares well with the fastest SLRs at this price. However, it’s a little disappointing that the X-T1 can’t track subjects as they move around the frame – a feature that’s fairly common among compact system cameras. Face detection is available, but enabling it overrides any other autofocus settings.

Fujifilm X-T1 Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is built in, and it’s a more capable implementation than we’ve seen from previous Fujifilm cameras. The new Fujifilm Camera Remote app for iOS and Android includes a remote viewfinder mode, complete with touchscreen spot focus and control over the ISO speed, exposure compensation and a range of other functions. It supports video capture, too. The app can also receive photos sent from the camera, browse the camera’s contents and use a smartphone’s GPS function to geotag photos. Wi-Fi setup is a little clumsy, though. Rather than use encryption and a saved password, the connection must be verified on both the camera and smartphone or tablet. The connection drops when switching between remote shooting and image transfer.