Fujifilm X half - It broke me and now I'm a vibetographer.
I LOVE IT. I hate it. I need to tell you about it.
Photography today is wild. Everything is nearly perfect. The lenses - the cameras - holy crap are they amazing. From top to bottom, almost any modern camera you buy will get you stunning results that would shock photographers even ten years ago.
But most new cameras don’t have a lot of heart.
Using them can be a clinical, “cold” experience. And the photos - aren’t they a little too perfect?
I think Fujifilm is onto something with the X half. Young people aren’t flocking to film and compact cameras because they want shitty cameras. Instead, they want to experience something tangible. Unique. REAL.
And flaws are real, aren’t they? Check out a few quick snaps from the X half:
Fuji is betting on the young generation wanting something grittier… more grounded in the nostalgia of the past, and they’ve released the X half, a camera that is 100% based on vibes.
Make no mistake - this is one cute camera. It’s tiny. Really light. Eighteen megapixels is actually not bad, and the battery lasts for days. However… those are really about all the positives.
There are many, many more flaws: It’s got a smallish sensor, there’s no weather sealing, and no stabilization. The lens is a fixed 32mm at f/2.8, and it’s just okay. The optical viewfinder is pretty bad. The autofocus can be painful. The rear LCD screen is small, low resolution, and doesn’t always respond very well to touch, and the ONLY way to use it is through touch.
EVERYTHING this camera does seems to have a delay.
It really is like going back to the year 2000 and using a point and shoot from that era. I don’t know if you remember, but it was painful. Every time you’d go to take a photo, there was a delay of one million years.
And that’s with this camera too. It’s not a great candid camera, because it’s so damn slow. It’s one of those cameras where you want to get a candid moment, but you seem to always miss it, and then you become the annoying person who says “hey, do that again.”
I hate those people.
Your phone, even an iPhone 7, is way faster on-the-draw than this.
Still, using it as your every-day-carry could be fun, if you’re set on leaning into the camera’s intense weirdness.
I don’t think a lot of target audience for this camera is going too care that much if it’s slow, or if the photos are a little mushy at night (they are).
The audience this camera was made for? They are coming for the vibes and the film sims. Everything else doesn’t matter. (And that’s okay!)
Let’s talk about film sims for a moment. Those are Fuji’s secret sauce, and that’s no different here. You can change the film simulation among 13 options, the white balance, and add grain, but there aren’t as many options to change the colors like you can with other cameras from Fujifilm.
Even more fun are the Filters. There are 26 of them ranging from really cool (light leak and halation) to really bad (canvas). These can’t be used in conjunction with Film Simulations (which is a shame). These are so enjoyable.
Gimmicky? Yes. Who cares!
Here are some shots with a variety of filters:
The camera, though, seems designed around the film advance lever, which has a few functions.
In regular shooting modes, pushing the lever toward the camera will show you a quick review of the previous photo you took.
Also in regular mode: if you pull the advance lever like you would with a film camera to go to the next frame, it puts the camera in 2-in-1 mode. This creates a diptych in-camera that you can use for both video and stills. THIS IS PRETTY AWESOME.
At the core of the X-Half though, is the “Film Camera Mode.” This is where Fujifilm is dialing in the “experience” of the film era.
You can choose 36, 54 and 72 exposures, include a date stamp, and either aperture-priority mode or “auto.”
Once you press “start” you go into “film” mode. This means the camera is locked in, and will only take the amount of exposures you chose at the beginning. (And I think they should have included 24 exposures as an option as well - 36 is just too many for me).
After taking a photo, the camera forces you to use the film advance lever to “advance” to the next frame.
And when you take a photo, you can’t see the preview. Instead you’ll have to wait till you develop the film later with the X half app:
It’s kind of awesome. There’s a certain joy in not knowing how the photos will turn out, and a brevity in the way it frees you to shoot that comes with knowing this camera isn’t to be taken too seriously.
The frivolous nature of the camera allows me to not care if I’m getting the perfect shot or not. It’s a little of the touch film experience without having to buy film or mess with darkroom chemicals and scanning!
Like I said earlier, in “film” mode, you can’t use the rear LCD screen, so all you have is the optical viewfinder. You can’t change modes, so if you suddenly decide you want to shoot a color shot instead of what’s in your “film roll”, you’ll the rest of the exposures on that “roll.”
You also need to remember that if you remove the battery or memory card, it will reset the “film mode” and you’ll lose the rest of you “roll” as well.
The experience is flawed by a few things. One - it’s so slow. My old film cameras took photos way faster than this. Even when you go full manual mode on focusing, the camera doesn’t respond as quickly as I want. That’s just a problem I have with the camera in almost every aspect.
Secondly - it doesn’t always make sense in my brain on when I need to push the film advance lever. Sometimes I swear I push it, but since the image was writing to the card at that exact time, it didn’t register my pull. So I go and take a photo - but nothing happens because the camera is SO DAMN slow it hadn’t registered my input. This is frustrating.
In film mode, once you go through a roll of film, you still can’t review the images. You’ll need the Fuji X-Half app, which actually works. It will show you a contact sheet after “developing” the film like the old days of the darkroom.
This process is slow and takes a while. I had one disconnect and it seemed to cause me to lose an entire roll of “film” I had in the camera. Maybe a bug? (It could have been user error.)
Here’s a question: with a camera this flawed, can it do serious work? SURE! It depends on what you mean by serious, but if you want to do art with this thing, why not? Here’s a book I bought recently at Half-Price books, and it’s awesome:
Photographer Wes Pope used aluminum soda cans for pinhole photography along Route 66. The X half is at least as good as a pop can camera. (Although I’d say the pop camera might be a better value at ZERO compared to almost $1000.)
I could imagine the X half becoming a foundation for something like this book. It does fit in a pocket, so why not take this everywhere and take crazy, grainy, fun photos along a highway stretch, or a neighborhood, or whatever you want. You could definitely make a book out of it, have gallery shows, and all of that using the X half. In fact, most of the shots here were in Benson and Blackstone, two neighborhoods within a few minutes from my house. Why not have an art show? Bring an Fujifilm instax, and it’s a party!
And yet, the flaws in this camera are hard to ignore. This is 2025, and Fuji could have done better.
Even the film advance lever isn’t great. I like it - I’m glad they put it in there because it’s a cool way to interact with your camera, but there’s no real resistance there. It just kind of flops, and sometimes I’m not sure if it registers or not. I go to take a photo, and nothing happens, so I have to do it again. There’s little tactile feedback.
And the fact that the film advance lever ALWAYS seems to stick out makes me crazy. I want the option to push it flat when I’m in any kind of shooting mode, but it won’t let me. I almost dropped it once when I went to put it in my pocket, but the lever was sticking out and it got caught on my belt.
Aspects like this make it seem poorly designed.
Compare the X-Half with the Ricoh GRIII. The GRIII is a bit more expensive, but it’s a really well-designed camera. It seems like most of the flaws in the GRIII were looked at by actual photographers, and the camera is wildly better in nearly every way than the X half. (The X half beats the Ricoh only in the vibes category.)
AND YET. This camera brought me a lot of joy. The photos are imperfect, flawed, and yet totally gnarly.
I started this review talking about Fuji betting on us wanting to experience real things. And I love that. It’s great that Fujifilm is making unique cameras that people enjoy, and it sucks when camera curmudgeons like me come in and just point out all the flaws.
But I think Fujifilm has lost it with the price.
I can’t recommend this camera to anyone who doesn’t have $850 laying around they don’t really want. It’s just too expensive.
In 2025, any camera that’s $850 should be fast and responsive. If people want a “hardcore” mode or something - let them press a button and cripple the camera. But for someone like me, the experience is just too slow and it’s too compromised. For $850, we have a crappy, low resolution LCD screen? I don’t even see an option for brightness. The freaking hot shoe doesn’t even work.
Something this small and toy-like should be priced cheaper. The X half has some pretty slow/old/not-great internals built around an attractive but seemingly not-too-rugged body. This is not a luxury item at all - this is really more of a toy (let’s remember artists throughout history have made fantastic art with way worse cameras than the X half though - so I’m not discounting the camera’s ability to tap into creativity).
Look - I don’t want to gatekeep anyone’s purchase. I see a lot of people online loving this camera, and if that’s you and you love it, that is awesome! I kind of love it too in a sick and twisted way.
But I want to provide a bit of a counter-narrative to the YouTube videos and articles out there who seem to quickly and lightly point out the flaws in the X half, but they still somehow end the video with beautiful, flowing music, and point you to their description where you can, of course, buy the camera. It’s easier to make money when you can convince your audience their capitalistic purchase will bring them all the vibes and friends they’ve been missing from their life.
They also want to keep a relationship with Fujifilm - just like I do. I want Fujifilm to like me. I want them to keep sending me stuff. I almost didn’t make this quietly negative review because I want Fujifilm to keep sending me stuff!
So if you’ve seen some overly-positive reviews of the X half… don’t believe them. I literally watched a review calling the autofocus “fast and responsive.”
IT IS NOT QUICK, RESPONSIVE, OR SEAMLESS.
Fujfilm is selling you a dream where you and your friends put on hip shirts, snapping photos while drinking $20 coffees. And they are brilliant. Fuji’s playing the long game here - getting into the hearts and minds of the younger TikTok generation. Eventually us old dinosaurs will die off, and Fujifilm will rule the world.
Because Fujifilm doesn’t make the best cameras, not even close. Yet they tap into the creative parts of our brain a lot better than anyone else.
Check out these vertical videos. They are almost objectively TERRIBLE, but there is a distinct audience out there who will love this Blair Witch-on-steroids look:
The X half is a vibe camera.
I want it - I like it - but it’s so flawed I can’t recommend it at $850. What needs to be cut in half is the price. At the most, I can see the camera being a “maybe” purchase at $500 or $600.
However, I’m pretty jaded. Do I want too much out of cameras? Let’s ask another photographer!
INTRODUCING my wife, Casey! She was my shooting partner for years when we were doing weddings, and there is no one on the planet with more soul and heart than her. I wanted her opinion on the camera since I’m so jaded!
Here is her beautiful face!
From Casey:
Shooting with the Fujifilm X half was fun. There’s no denying that. It’s lightweight, felt good in my hands, and offers just enough of a creative challenge to keep things interesting. As a former portrait photographer who’s moved on from heavy gear and RAW files, I appreciate a camera that’s quirky and lets me shoot intentionally, even with the limits of what it can do.
I’m not a techy photog. Half the time I don’t remember which camera I’m shooting with. I know, I know, how can I be married to JerredZ? I think that’s why we work. I don’t need to explain the rule of thirds or need an unreasonably high pixel count because I might want to print something ginormous someday (even when we shot weddings, couples almost never printed anything beyond 8x10s).
For me, I just want to feel something when I take a photo. And when I look at the image later.
The X half gave me that for a moment. A slow shutter, a nostalgic feel, and an excuse to spend a summer night wandering outside with the people I love (something that doesn’t happen often enough). That made it worthwhile.
But if I’m honest, it’s probably not worth the price. Like many trendy cameras, it stirs something at first, then fades. The tech hangups, the limitations, the slow responsiveness, they start to get in the way.
It reminds me of other tools I used to love, like my Canon Pro1 Powershot or the old Lensbaby. They were full of charm, but ultimately temporary. The truth is, it’s not about the camera. It’s about the artist behind it. If you’ve got extra cash and want a little joyride of inspiration, go for it. But if you’re like me and choosing where to invest as a working creative, there are more practical ways to capture beauty, save a few bucks, and still be moved.
All that being said, I think Fuji is on to something, if they can just hone what they’re trying to do and make sure their price points match their audience. More creative options like light leaks or other artistic elements at a more attainable price point could be the key. Locking in on having more fun and connecting with each other and the world around us is something we can all use more of these days. And something worth investing in.
Oh man. Are you still reading? THANK YOU!
And just so you know… I’m seriously thinking of trading my X100vi in for the X half. It’s an insane idea - but the X100 is just kind of boring. It’s a fantastic camera - but my “fun” camera now is my OM-3. Maybe the X half can be a dedicated camera for a project? Route 66 and a bunch of abandoned gas stations just might be perfect…
How many cameras do I need? All of them. I need them all.
Hey! Like the content and my vibe?
Email me, message me, or whatever here:
www.jerredz.com
www.youtube.com/jerredz
You know you can buy 2 Fuji disposable cameras at Walmart for $25 and developed and scanned for less than $15, right? No shutter lag. Nice to meet your lovely wife.
Thanks for sharing this. I was never interested in it. I sold all my Fujifilm gear early last year and still not interested. I'm the odd duck but I prefer their x-trans 2 sensors. I do however, LOVE my new OM-3. It's really a joy!