My Fuji X-T20 is nearing the end of its life. So yesterday, I popped into House of Fuji in Covent Garden and picked up a shiny new Fuji X-T50 to give a go. You book online, pay a deposit and it’s yours for about 48 hours to give a whirl. It’s a brilliant service. I just needed a couple of hours, though. Not two days. Just enough time to walk from Covent Garden to the British Museum and back.
It’s not dissimilar to my X-T20, unsurprisingly. It’s a bit chunkier, because it packs in-body image stabilisation – undoubtedly the key upgrade. It’s swapped the trackpad for a little joystick on the back – hopefully it’s made of sturdy stuff. A lot of the rest of it is much the same.
It’s innards has a new 40mp sensor, a huge improvement. It connects to the new Fuji app on my iPhone, a trick the X-T20 couldn’t pull off. This is crucial. I like to geotag my photos, and this automates the process, in camera. I tested the feature, and it worked as advertised.
There is now a dial on top of the camera to change the film settings. I’m not sure I like it there. On my X-T20, I have a customised thumb dial on the back for that job, and it works better for me. Never mind. It’s not a deal breaker. I liked the camera. I liked the images. I wished I’d adjusted the video settings. The default was 1080p. But it still produced nice video.
I was going to test the X-T5 and choose between the two. But I don’t think I need to. I value the compact size of this model more than I do the additional features of the X-T5. I returned my loan yesterday afternoon. But I will have one in my hands again soon….
The Mexile 
My Canon m50 has a geotag feature, connected to the phone via Bluetooth that is dandy. You then download the images into Lightroom which has a Map feature that tells you the geocoordinates but also the name of the place where the photo was taken. There’s also a feature for downloading the images from the camera to your laptop via Bluetooth but I tried it once and it’s pretty slow. Or to trigger the shutter remotely. The thing to decide is whether you want a new camera because of certain bells and whistles, like Bluetooth and Google Maps; or you want better quality images, or equally important, you’re getting old and feel you deserve a new toy. Do you have any extra Fuji lenses that you could use in the new camera?
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The Canon app sounds identical to the Fuji one. Alas, the Fuji one only supports camera models back to about 2019. Mine is a bit more elderly. Geotagging is important to me, and the apps I’ve used have always proven less than satisfactory. I’m also irked that Lightroom doesn’t support geotagging outside of the Classic app on a desktop. But such is life. The data is still there when I export to Apple Photos.
And I totally deserve a new camera, of course! But I’m buying it because the tech upgrades since my one came out are pretty substantial. Stabilisation, geotagging, megapixel increase.
Does this mean I’ll get better pictures out of it? Definitely. Will they be £1,000 better? I’ll let you know… 🤔
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