So, while a lot of the photography industry was busy losing their minds over the latest full-frame mirrorless releases from Canon and Nikon, Fujifilm was busy releasing and launching their brand new Fujifilm XT3, which is their first third-generation X-T series camera and is objectively likely the APS-C mirrorless camera to beat on the market at the time of writing this.
Fujifilm was kind enough to send me an X-T3 to try out for a review, and while I am still working on it, I have had several days with the camera now and I wanted to take a minute to share some initial thoughts and impressions on this new beast of a camera from Fujifilm.
First off, for all intents and purposes, the X-T3 looks and feels like the X-T2. They made some slight modifications to the camera design, of course, but for the most part, if you had the two cameras side by side you would likely assume that they were the same camera. So, with that out of the way, let’s get to talking about what is new in the Fujifilm X-T3, and that is the sensor and processor, and holy crap, Fujifilm have knocked it out of the park with this one if my initial testing is any indication.
Part of the new sensor with the X-T3 comes to a vastly improved AF system, which not only has some impressive new face tracking functionality, but also a great AF system altogether, which is saying something because the X-T2 was already pretty dang good in the AF department. To test out the AF I decided to go for a walk along marine drive here in the Portland area, for those who are not local, this is the road that follows the Columbia River and sites between the river and PDX (Portland International Airport). I used the opportunity to take pictures of planes, jets, and local wildlife along the river and I came away really impressed with what I was seeing out of the X-T3 in this setting.
For example, I decided to shoot some of the seagulls as they flew around the river. I slapped the Fujinon 100-400mm OSS on the X-T3 and I went to town shooting the birds. The camera was able to track the birds, even with their erratic flight patterns, very well and I didn’t even need to tweak the AF settings at all. That was always my one complaint with the X-T2, in order to really get the best AF performance you really needed to know how to tweak the AF settings for a given situation. The X-T3, at least in my experience so far, seems to be great out of the box without the need to jump into the menus to tweak AF settings unless you really want to and know what you doing.
Anyway, these were just some initial thoughts on the camera now, after a few days of playing around with it. Stay tuned in the future for my full review once I have had a chance to get all of my testing on the Fujifilm X-T3 complete. In the meantime, here are some SOOC sample images from my shooting with the X-T3 so far.
