The X Half Factor
If you’re anything like me, you carry your cell phone around with you like a bad boyfriend. You know you gotta break up, but it’s oh so easy to keep it with you. One of the reasons I keep my phone with me is the potential for a photo. I’m a millennial, we grew up when photos were hard to come by, check out my lack of baby photos for evidence of this.
In the 90’s my parents had to be really sure they wanted to take a photo because they had to pay for the film to be developed. You had to be sure that the flash was on if you were indoors, otherwise the family photo would be black. Today it’s so easy, my phone is always in my pocket and if my four year old chooses a moment to be adorable, I can whip my phone out to take a picture. The problem is my phone comes with other baggage. It carries the weight of the entire internet; my emails, addictive social media apps, my credit card details for any spur of the moment purchases. It has become a burden.
Here’s the thing. Fuji knows that. They know that I want to break up with my phone. They also know that I’m nostalgic for times before we were all shackled to the internet.
Enter the Fuji X Half, a camera that is an experience.
The back features two touchscreens, first a tall 3:4 screen for navigating menus, settings, and previewing images. Beside it on the left is a second skinny touchscreen for quickly flicking through different film and filter modes to achieve different results. The benefit of splitting off the filter and film selection into its own screen is that you can see the effects being applied in real time on the primary screen. The business end is a 1-inch back-illuminated sensor and a 32mm F2.8 (35mm equivalent) prime lens, that is friendly enough for newcomers to go wild with, and complicated enough for professionals to squeeze a bit more out of.
Everything from the Frame Advance Lever on the top for taking two in one shots to the date being baked into the bottom corner of the photo makes you want to play more with your compositions, and harken back to simpler times.
Recorded video is of great quality, and it has a surprisingly effective mic, which I wasn’t expecting at all. I definitely recommend though that as simple as it is to get running, a few tutorials online will show you how to get so much more out of this camera.
At first I thought this camera was just a gimmick, something slick looking with added filters to make my generation look twice. The more I use it however, the more I realize what a clever device it is. It is a genuine joy to discover how this camera works, and it’s small enough to have me leaving my phone behind, and grabbing this 240 gram cutie instead. It almost fits in my tiny woman pockets.
It has an added bonus for me, my kid loves it. I was having the usual parenting experience at the grocery store, high pitched wailing, floor break dancing, the entire four year old works. Until I thought to hand the X Half to him. Shopping then went from drudgery to delightful, we trotted around the shop, picking out our veggies and I thought to myself, “how cute, and I’m going to have photos of all these vegetables now.” I had to laugh when we got home and I reviewed the pictures that my son had taken. Every single one, a photo of my butt. I guess I can’t be surprised, my son is the perfect height for rear view image taking. I would have added them here for you to laugh with me, but apparently in a particularly vain moment, I went onto the device and deleted every one of them. I’m sorry friends, you’ll just have to imagine that one.
I found sharing the images from the device to my phone to be super easy using the dedicated “X half app”. Bluetooth connection to the camera was happy and quick, this surprised me since my phone can be funny about connecting to devices. And although it was easy to transfer the images, I did not find that had me back and shackled to my phone. The X Half encouraged me to leave the internet behind and “develop” my film later. It encourages adventure, it brings charm to the mundane, it makes each photo charming and classy…unless it’s a picture of my derriere.
