Conclusion
Pros
- Compact and well constructed
- Controls are familiar and well laid out
- Lens is of high quality: sharp, good bokeh in most situations and excellent CA control
- Typical good Fuji APS-C image quality
- Rear flip screen has good touch response and flips 180 degrees up
- Excellent JPEG quality
- Full featured Wi-Fi
- Leaf shutter allows for high flash sync speeds
- Front control ring adds another direct control for the exposure triangle
Cons
- Autofocus is fairly slow
- Bokeh gets busy at medium distances
- No viewfinder
- Aperture ring can be fiddly to operate
At $700, Fuji’s X70 sits right in that area where it’s not an inexpensive camera, and yet it’s not going to break the bank either. And that’s sort of how I feel about the camera in general. Everything is in a sort of middle ground with the X70. It’s quite compact, but it’s not really, really small. It’s got very good image quality, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before in Fuji land. It’s got a high quality lens, but it focuses fairly slowly. It’s got a brand new touch screen, but for that you trade a viewfinder. In that vein, it leaves me in the middle with regards to a recommendation. There’s nothing really new, aside from the touch screen, about the X70. Most of that is actually just fine. The X-Trans 2 sensor is tried and true and produces images with excellent quality. The feature set is already robust and leaves out few things that most photographers would need. The lens is very good, but it falls just short of outstanding. In all, it’s really a very good camera, but I don’t know if it’s quite good enough to justify spending $700, considering the fixed lens. If you really want a compact camera that produces great images and you love the moderate wide-angle focal length, you’ll really enjoy the camera. However, for most people, I think one of the smaller bodies (say, perhaps the new X-A3) with the 18mm f/2 pancake lens will be a smarter buy. That combo together is more expensive than the X70, but it also gives you the option to change lenses and build a system down the road. You have to really want what the X70 offers. If you do, you’ll love it.
Image Samples
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