Fujifilm X half: Is it the perfect family camera?
arslan.io38 points by farslan 3 days ago
38 points by farslan 3 days ago
According to this essay, the options for his kids are a $50 toy "camera" and an $850 niche camera possibly targeted at people who usually own the $2,000 line of the same brand. Surely there's something in between?
I can't help but wonder if this is a purchase for himself.
My thoughts exactly.
This is a bizarre article. The elephant in the room is on the lower end most mid-range phones will beat a digital camera under 300$.
I wouldn't give a kid an expensive camera. Kids drop things. If you give Junior an 850$ camera and he loses it that's on you.
Then again, this is HN. Maybe he makes 700k TC per year and money is no object. Even then he admits for a few hundred more you can get a much more capable Fuji camera.
I purchased a used Fujifilm Fuji X-A5 for around 250$ off eBay, and a new XC 15-45 for 120$. It's not the best camera by any means, but I'm relatively stress free when using it compared to more expensive options.
Truth be told when your starting out you don't really need amazing gear. This goes for every hobby.
Price sensitivity re: children and breaking things is going to depend on financial situation and intention. This is a person that shoots a $10k Leica, so I'm going to guess there's more than enough money and a strong intent to share an "authentic" photography experience (a camera of traditional form) with their kids. The latter appears to be this camera's gimmick.
They describe this camera as "cheap" even!
The Kodak Brownie addressed exactly this issue and was released 125 years ago!
He should try some of the new ass end mirrorless cameras that are designed to be cameras and not fashion accessories. That might scare him off his Leica and this turd.
Leica is obviously social signalling.
He gets to let us know he REALLY cares about photography.
Photography is ultimately subjective anyway, if he feels a 10k camera worth it that's cool.
IMO if your new wait for a sale or buy someone else's failed ambitions off eBay. I'm no pro but plenty of very capable cameras can be had under 1000$. The lenses are the expensive parts
This picks apart image quality from an iPhone 15 Pro Max regarding noise and usable dynamic range: https://youtu.be/bSm3LXNF7pI?feature=shared&t=1360
For anything more than basic software-processed output and utility snaps or selfies, this high-end phone loses pretty terribly to an average hybrid consumer camera.
Absolutely. We have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, a Kodak Pixpro FZ55, and a Panasonic G9 II + Panasonic Leica 12-60.
The iPhone can't even hope to touch the cheap Kodak, much less the actual mirrorless.
What’s the net output for the majority of photos?
Probably a social media post at best. I don’t think most viewers are going to be that critical. The best camera is always the one you have on you .
My wifes new Kodak Pixpro FZ55 ($130) absolutely smokes my iPhone 15 Pro.
I shoot a Panasonic G9 II and thats a completely different level.
He says he doesn't collect cameras but instead he sells them. My take is that the bottom tranche of cheap cameras is awful but that you have a huge selection of used cameras on Ebay, in his shoes I would have expected to get something used but good for $200 or so.
One of the reasons I go around with two Sonys in my backpack is that I can go to an event and take action shots while I put the other body with a 90mm lens and have somebody else who doesn't know a lot about how to work a mirrorless shoot headshots. On the other hand, I do collect weird cameras and you might find I have two stereo cameras in my other bag.
Do you let guests shoot the 90mm in full auto mode? Personally I've found that the general population has a really hard time operating a camera. My partner and I can both do photography though I'm more serious about it and we frequently travel with cameras. When we want someone else to take pictures, even on Auto mode I find others have a hard time. If we're in a hurry and want a picture taken by someone else we just hand them a phone.
Usually it would be aperture priority (f/2.8) in a situation where I know what the light is so I can set the ISO and leave it there. I develop with DxO so I am not worried about noise or the shutter speed too long but I do worry about hitting 1/8000 sec -- so usually it would be a situation where the lighting is predictable.
The autofocus can be set in a mode where it will reliably lock on the subject's eye. I would demo how you have to be a certain distance to get a headshot, since it is a prime lens, if they are too far away I don't worry too much because modern cameras have a lot of pixels.
For me it's the AF. Every. Single. Time. People on smartphone, used to near-infinite depth of field, just forgot/never learned about focusing, and handing them a camera just too often results with the background being in focus and the subject blurry.
For kids, I'd buy a small used micro four thirds camera with a pancake lens. Cheaper and later expandable if they enjoy taking pictures.
Or, if it needs to be a zoomable lens, I'd look for some used (but well maintained) Digital Ixus or PowerShot.
With either of these they can learn much more about photography than with a toy camera.
Canon PowerShot is the way. I grew up on those. It's the perfect type of camera for letting kids/teenagers figure out how photography works as they grow up.
I've taken pictures with a 7MP 1/1.8" sensor PowerShot that look so good the prints still hang in several family members' houses. And not because they are photos of people, I'm talking macros and underwater photography (the latter with an original Canon waterproof case and a DIY-contraption with an optically slaved 1970s Nikonos flash).
If you put the work in and ignored the DSLR crowd, those cameras were fantastic. I had a full tilt LCD screen in 2005. That feature is completely standard today, but it took the DSLRs a full decade to catch up. On the later models you got 20x, even 40x optical zoom with decent apertures.
With CHDK we had global electronic shutter working down to 1/30,000 of a second. We wrote code than ran on our cameras to do motion detection for stuff like lightning photography. We scripted timelapses with exposure control that factored in sunset timings. We scripted focus and exposure bracketing for HDR and infinite DoF. That was twenty years ago, on an undocumented 32-bit architecture that people painstakingly reverse engineered.
The only thing we could never get was bokeh on the telephoto end. Optics is a harsh mistress.
As a long time micro four thirds shooter:
The Panasonic 20/1.7 is an amazing little lens but its autofocus is absolutely horrible. I used to carry it and an E-M5 (the first one) and the shots were great but AF was near useless.
Photography nerds rarely bring this up but pretty obviously the best camera for kids is an old smartphone. A 2020-era iphone has a better sensor and is cheaper than this thing, assuming they don't already have one around. Photo transfer problem is solved, and the interface is already familiar to kids for better or worse.
Folks who are into photography and want to introduce it to their family/kids want to gently introduce the skills of photography while enabling their interest in taking pictures. Smartphones are great at just "taking pictures" but don't offer a lot of creative input. Table stakes like depth-of-field and color balance are either impossible to configure or very difficult on a smartphone. Controlling exposure is very difficult as most smartphones try to just aim for neutral exposure. Software can change exposure settings, and on Android I use a paid camera app that gives me control of shutter speed and ISO to control exposure.
But you're correct that if picture quality and ease of use are the main points of contention, a used iPhone or used Pixel phone is probably all you need to get sharp pictures and decent auto-HDR.
That's not to say that an $850 Fuji body is the only way forward. I'd probably buy a younger kid a used point-and-shoot and buy an older kid one of those cheaper compacts. That Fuji body is almost as expensive as a real mirrorless that I shoot with for paid work.
Kids point and shoot cameras have none of those features. In fact, an old smartphone has far more photographic controls than almost any kid's camera will.
If the choice is a $50 Kid's purpose built camera or a smartphone, the smartphone is the clear winner. Nobody was suggesting an old smartphone over an $800+ Fuji.
You have to have used a kid's point & shoot to understand how terrible they truly are. My kids had one which couldn't even disable the flash entirely. The sensor is a cheap 1 MP out of a webcam. The modes are three: Photo, Video, and Review. There is no manual controls, no photographic tools, maybe MAYBE you might get some fun filters.
Right I'm not talking about a kid-specific point-and-shoot. There's lots of used point-and-shoots on eBay of varying quality from the 2000s and there's still some compacts being built now, though those tend to be marketed toward vlogging.
That's what we did.
Most "kids cameras" sold today just use cheap webcam sensors (e.g. 1 MP, low dynamic range) that are sold for excessively high prices. They have few physical controls, no viewfinder, and are bulky.
Instead, why not grab a used iPhone SE, the camera sensor is still fantastic, and it will likely cost you less than most kids cameras. Remove everything except the Camera App, leave it in Airplane mode, and it will last roughly two days on a single charge (over a week idle).
PS - You can find deals on used cellphones by looking for "network locked" ones, since you won't be putting a SIM in it anyway.
There’s also the last-gen iPod Touch, which is getting a bit long in the tooth but as a cell-phone-without-a-cell-radio is nearly perfect for this application, and is an incredibly nice form factor.
A 2020-era iPhone has good default-setting software. That's good for learning about framing.
Beyond framing, though... The sensor is pretty meh; use an app like Halide to take fully-unprocessed raw shots (not still-Apple-processed Raw out of the camera app) to compare. The processing is good, with a caveat - it's good at producing a certain look, but there's limited ability to go beyond that with the default software.
Still, old iPhone + Halide will let you learn a decent bit about exposure and shutter speed and ISO. Not being able to control aperture is gonna be your biggest drawback in terms of learning about photography. But having a sensor that's a bit less forgiving than a Fuji one might be good for playing with - make the hard decisions about framing instead of just assuming everything will always be well-exposed. (I haven't used the X-half, but a considerably cheaper used X-whatever would be much better than a 2020 iPhone for non-computationally-processed shots).
I would dare even say the provided examples from the camera are objectively worse than what a mid range smartphone could do 5 years ago with a sensor probably just a tenth of the size. So much low light noise, is that lens decorative or what?
Everyone here keeps touting an old phone, and I have to heatedly disagree.
But a Kodak Pixpro FZ55 or FZ45. Brand new for $130 or less, beats even the best smartphones, and are Japan's top selling cameras for a reason.
I was curious so I looked at the price, it's absurd.
$850, that price point is dead in the water to me. I may as well move up to other Fuji cameras that provide far more for not that much more money.
It's a "perfect family camera" if you don't consider the price...
A camera that costs as much as a flagship smartphone shouldn't need a "setting expectations" section. Particularly when those expectations are "this is going to take worse pictures and be harder to use than your smartphone"...
It might be an okay intro-to-"real"-cameras device, since it's far less huge-and-clunky than an equivalently priced DSLR. But even there the tradeoffs don't look great.
Exactly. Phone cameras have completely absorbed the middle-ground for cameras. You either can find a cheap one where you don't care as much about the quality (for kids, or times when the phone could get damaged). Or you can find expensive ones like this where the fact that it's not a phone is the main feature. Any middle-range point and shoot has been out competed by the the phone you probably already have with you. That leaves the higher end DSLR style camera as the only other market segment for a standalone camera.
My kid recently asked about getting a stand alone camera. I found this one, but at that price, they needed to have a really good reason. In the end, I told them to use their phone anyway.
“¯\_(ツ)_/¯“
The price is crazy for the sensor size.
Crazy good or bad?
The X Half's selling point is all of it's software and hardware gimmicks. Strictly going by the numbers, you really aren't getting much camera for the money.
The article's author didn't like the quality of the photos, so seemingly crazy bad.
crazy by itself is always bad. crazy good is a different thing that was added later
Not true. There is crazy (interesting), crazy (neutral), and crazy (I don't care).
I don't know about "family", but those looking for a camera for kids should consider an old iPhone with "assistive access" turned on. This is what the Camera app looks like in that mode:
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/came...
Assistive access is an amazing mode for kids and adults with accessibility problems and I'm constantly surprised that Apple doesn't promote it more.
I think what most replies miss is the emphasis this article makes on the experience, not the pricing.
There might be whole new market in between X-half, toy cameras and iPhones. Try shooting anything except your phone, and you will drown in ISO settings, different photography modes, and dealing with sloppy "effects" if you want to adjust any colors in-camera. Experience just is not there.
If what author is describing hits home for more families, and someone can make the same package for quarter of the price, it could be an instant hit. Now it is just an empty niche with a single [and arguably overpriced] solution in it.
I actually have a ton of toy cameras and I love them, so I bet I would love that Fuji too. It's right up my alley in terms of what I like: something a little silly and fun that is easily portable and can take pictures.
The only thing is price is way too high for what it is. As much fun as I would have with it, $800 is too much for what it is. And that is definitely too high for something you're handing to your kids. Anyone with kids knows that kids tend to break things or lose things pretty frequently.
I have a "camp snap" camera that costs something like $50 (was even less when I bought it) and operates similar to the Fuji in that it's one button to take a picture, no screen so you don't see it until later. Yeah, the quality isn't as high as your $10,000 body only Leica M11... but as it says here "the sensor is too small, but the kids didn’t care".
I also have a thermal print kids camera that my two year old son loves to carry around, although he more or less just snaps random photos of the ground and doesn't point it at anything. It's a blast for me to take out with friends sometimes too, since the cost of receipt paper makes it maybe two cents for an instant printed photo with a nice black and white dithered look. The battery does go pretty quick when the printer is on but the camera was less than $20.
For a more adult camera, you can get a decent something used for maybe $200 that will take fairly high quality photos (much better than the Fuji in question).
Just a word of warning, thermal printer paper has dangerous levels of BPA.
Is that actually true? There are millions of cashiers in the US who handle receipts all day. Is the BPA exposure causing problems for them?
Yes it is, a few businesses such as Walgreens are moving to replace it over the next few years.
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/business-with-us/bpa-and-bps-in-...
I have heard that so I buy a BPA free one. Not 100% sure it is better but it claims to be. The one I get is actually a little large for the camera so I take a minute to unroll half of it and split it into two rolls that will actually fit inside.
Used cameras and lenses can offer tremendous value.
This. My humble setup is a Sony a100 with some good old Minolta lenses.
My first SLR was an A100.
Fond memories, I carried that camera all over the world for 6 years.
Exactly. And the "sensor size myth" is nothing a kid should (or would) care about.
There are some very good YouTube channels talking about micro four thirds cameras, which are still a good choice, especially when used as a camera to carry every day.
Disclaimer, own and use full frame, APS-C, and even Ixus and Powershot cameras which all can produce decent images if one knows how and when to use them. Oh, smartphone, of course.
I'd love a lower cost camera that can do geotagging.
It's so cute. I love the touch of analog on the rear display. I have a XPro3 myself, which was another line they tried these analog features on, and it has been a wonderful camera! If I had to upgrade, the X-E5 is the only other model that appeals to me for now.
Also: iPhone cameras don't seem like they're ever going to replace a hard camera for me. They can take incredibly photos, but the processing is just so HDR heavy and approaching Canon's sterile level of accuracy, they don't have the character I want in photos I'd print and display around my home.
Yeah that. Phones are awful. I have an iPhone 15 Pro which is supposed to be quite good. It's not. I got so fed up with it I dug out my now ancient Nikon D3100 and took that around for a few days. Suprisingly it still works fine. It was incredibly better than the iPhone is which was painful. So I bought a new Nikon Z50ii mirrorless which is the indirect successor. Doubt I'll use a phone for anything again other than utility photography.
As for this thing in the article, urgh. Old cameras were designed badly and had poor ergonomics because of mechanical constraints. Why do we keep copying shitty old designs?!?
I'm more excited about their "medium format" digital cameras. Yeah, okay, $4K, but I've been pining for larger CCD's and Fuji are going there.
Nitpick, technically they are CMOS, not CCD sensors ;)
A modern CCD camera would be neat though
What do you prefer about CCD?
Note where I'm coming from, not a photographer but a user of scientific image sensors.
ignoring the silly locked vertical aspect ratio, the samples shots are awful. The clipped highlights in the left corner or first picture look worse than an iPhone's. Assume that's Fuji's poorly-applied film emulation making the picture of the running track look muddy and terrible
I doubt that it does any advanced HDR stuff like modern phones do so it's going to clip unless exposure is controlled. It's a shame that in this day and age camera companies can't achieve as great instant results as modern phones even though they have much larger sensors and better optics.
had a moment reading this. reminded me of that old yashica electro my dad used to shoot on. no burst or preview, only the frame. somehow we ended up with better photos then.
this x half not spec-heavy or for gear forums. just... fun. the kind you sling on your shoulder, snap stupid faces, print them later and realise they mattered
jpeg-only and all that? honestly fine. if you're worried about dynamic range on your kid’s birthday, you’re doing it wrong
hope more companies lean into this direction. imperfect and honest and cool
tbh, Camp Snap sounds like the best choice for this use case. It's cheap, with long battery life, a real viewfinder and decoration-friendly for kids.
My own kids are far from neurotypical, but I imagine this is universal: Their preferred photo taking device is any kind of old smartphone or tablet. Nothing can beat the huge viewfinder and frankly, the ease of use.
And that's not "monkey see, monkey do" either. Daddy still uses real cameras. This is their own, natural preference.
>It certainly doesn’t justify a price tag of $850.
For that price you can get a cellphone with 200megapixels.
That uses a ton of magic protocols that arent well explained to produce better pictures than any handheld.
No, it's a stupid, overpriced, gimmick camera designed to part fools and clout chasers from their money.
> The first few weeks everything went ok, until we had to copy the photos to their iPads.
> [wifi didn’t work]
It’s bad that in 2025, digital cameras do not ship with a way to automatically upload to Apple and Google’s photo libraries, for free, and clearing the local storage as images and videos get uploaded.
you expect digital cameras to provide cellular internet access for free?
Unironically why not? With how much high-end cameras cost, adding a single-purpose data-plan on top can't be _that_ expensive.
The battery life of a camera doing basically constant uploads of > 10 MB images over cellular, potentially even in bad reception areas will be awful. It seems much more sensible to just offer a good wifi experience.
Kindles offering global reception back in the days for downloading a few kb of ebooks every few weeks are a very different game.