You say Fuji I say Fujica…
Fuji has released yet another camera that has peaked my interest, the Fuji X10. It is a small fixed zoom lens camera (28-112mm equivalent) with a maximum aperture of F2.0 at the wide end and F2.8 at the telephoto end. All this information is readily available elsewhere so that’s not really what I want to post about. One of the new features of the X10 apparently is that manual focus is performed in the form of the sub command dial. This may seem new and innovative but it is actually something Fuji has done before. The Fujica 35SE used a thumb wheel back in 1959 in combination with a coupled rangefinder. In this form I can say it works very well, the only problem for me being that that same location changes my aperture on my DSLR and it takes me a moment to get that through my skull. How well the modern implementation works remains to be seen especially without the rangefinder patch. When I first started writing this post most of the scant info about manual focus mentioned the main command wheel for focusing but after reading more info from Fuji itself it seems that it is the sub command dial which will not be as easily done with a thumb or even one handed.
