Fujifilm X100V

The X100V is the camera that made the X100 line famous outside photography. It fixed the one real complaint about every previous version — a lens that went soft at close focus wide open — and it arrived just as short-form video decided that Fujifilm colour was a personality trait.

The redesigned lens

The 23mm f/2 was rebuilt for the V with two aspherical elements. Every X100 before it went noticeably soft wide open at minimum focus distance, which is exactly where you shoot a plate of food or a face across a table.

The V fixed it. Close-focus performance at f/2 went from a known compromise to genuinely sharp, and that single change is why used prices stayed high for years.

X100V or X100VI?

The VI adds 40 megapixels, six stops of in-body stabilisation and REALA ACE, in a body two millimetres thicker. Those are real gains, especially the stabiliser.

What the V keeps is the same lens, the same hybrid viewfinder and the same handling, usually for several hundred dollars less. If you shoot in daylight and do not crop hard, the V takes a photograph you cannot distinguish from the VI at normal sizes.

Buying one now

Production ended, so this is a used purchase. Check the tilting screen mechanism, the lens for dust and the front element for scratches — the barrel is exposed without the AR-X100 adapter ring, and many owners never fitted one.

Weather sealing works only with that adapter ring plus a protective filter. A V sold as weather sealed without either is not.