ITravelNomad

Overview

This camera has just passed it’s three year anniversary (23 January 2020) since the launch and for the money it is on sale right now, with the 24mp sensor and 4k no crop video and 15-45 lens (3x zoom), making it a great choice of camera for new bloggers on the go or talking head vlogs, or just smartphone users looking for a better quality for their stills and video. The competition does not do a good job to get something even comparable in this 550 EUR price range as new.

The competition does not do a good job to get something even comparable in this 550 EUR price range as new. Not even DSLR can get close to this.

It has the utility factor by being a great camera to keep in the jacket pocket during trips and if you need more juice for some reason, it can be charged on the go from a powerbank.

Highlights

Body

The Fujifilm X-T200 is a mirrorless camera that uses the company’s X-mount. It has a 24MP APS-C sensor (non X-Trans) with on-sensor phase detection.

Kit Lens

The Fuji camera has a 15-45mm OIS 3.5 – 5.6 lens has a silent electronic zoom and focus with in built-in stabilization. The electronic zoom and focus function is not possible to override and disable 100% and I believe it is one of the functions that could have been a real battery saver.

Lens breathing is not present, bokeh is nice with good performance for both night and day shots. Bokeh is best when shooting macro mode.

15-45mm means that it is a 3x zoom lens which includes a stabilizer (OIS as Fujifilm call it), which I have found is working fine for daytime and night time shots. Although at night, you should be looking for using a more stable stand, tripod or monopod for shooting in low light, low shutter speed conditions for best results.

Photos

The camera can shoot continuous AF at up to 8 fps, with an additional limitation due to the limited buffer. I would not consider this a constraint though. I only found this issue during the testing of the buffer, while in real life, I could not reach this buffer when photographing the landscape, portrait or action in the kids playground. This buffer should not be an issue for most situations.

Video

Uncropped, oversampled 4K up to 30p, has a 15 minute limit. Video quality is above average in 4k resolution. Stabilization is very good while doing a handheld selfie vlog.

Connectors

The camera has a built-in mic jack and headphones adapter delivered in the box. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The USB-C is capable of charging the camera battery without having the need for an external charger, which I found useful during my outside shoots. Meaning that when I had to go out on the field, I would be comfortable of using only 1 battery during the whole day out.

It is possible to disable the limitation while using an external recorder connected to the micro-HDMI port on the side of the camera, right where the USB-C plug is found.

Battery

The Battery on the X-T200 was way below my expectations compared with a smartphone like iPhone 12 Pro Max can take a lot of photos and video before needing a charge. Also looking back at a DSLR like 850D Canon, it will be an unfair comparison as DSLR is twice the camera size and you mostly shoot via the optical viewfinder, while with the mirrorless even if it has an electrical viewfinder (will save a great deal of battery if you use it ) I tended to shoot more with the tilt screen. DSLR might shoot more but it does not give you the same practicality. A spare battery would be preferred if you consider this camera.

Charging

During the few days of shooting it was becoming aparent that I needed to have with me an external battery power bank (tested with a QC3.0 PD18W Power bank). Unfortunately, I was not able to shoot while the camera was charging. It kept on displaying that it has an open USB connection on the screen and there was nothing I could do. Power on, off, menu access were all disabled from use.

I did not count charging time to the second, but I can tell you that I realized while leaving home that the battery was down to the last third. That’s when I took out my fastest charging battery a PD18W QC3.0 fast charge power bank.

The trip I made from home to the park where I took most of the shots is 30-45 minutes away from home. After charging, I had no issue with shooting a 2 hour session of photos in 5-10 degrees Celsius and still have some juice left. Unfortunately, A two hours session of photo and video is pretty average for a quality stills camera in our days. I would have wanted either a bit more juice out of the battery or have at least 1 more spare for treating my “range anxiety”.

Size

Display panel

It’s a relatively compact size, but it has a large display covering most of the back panel. Display panel is fully articulating 3.5″ touchscreen, plus an electronic viewfinder and even a built-in flash. It’s the perfect companion on the go for its size.

Look and feel

The camera looks great in the two tone color pattern similar of Fujifilm and other cameras in the past. And as you can see from the emoji’s on our phones, this color pattern has also transferred in the virtual world, being seen as a trademark for good looking cameras and timeless design. The display panel has really nice colors. Feels like a complete package. It really stood out to me how compact the lenses are in a mirrorless camera without compromising on the quality even for a kit lens.

Grip and ergonomics

The X-T200 grip is sometimes not so nice for holding with the right hand(not so sure how left handed). This is due to its small extrusion in the front side of the camera then making the hand to compensate the grip, by holding more of the back side of the camera. This is when sometimes the big screen on the back becomes also an issue where your hand and most of the times, your thumb, will keep pressing randomly on the touchscreen on the back of the screen. You have to make compromises to enjoy the large screen.

Button usability and layout

In my 3 day test of the X-T200, my first time with a Fujifilm camera, I was impressed of the ease of learning the use of the buttons and the capabilities of the menu. Having previous experience with other Canon and Nikon DSLR type cameras it was a bit of a a learning curve to get to know the features and its capabilities without having to look at the menu.

First thing I recommend of doing is playing around with the camera profiles dial and try to test them one by one. I only found out in the 2nd day of shooting, how the SP (special profiles) feature is working and ended up using this feature the most out of all of the photo profiles. I feel this is a great way for all new users to get onboarded with a Fujifilm camera and gain confidence in shooting with a more advanced camera than a point and shoot.

Advantages of Fujifilm X-T200 buttons usability and layout

The Fujifilm X-T200 has been a real treat when switching camera profiles and micromanaging the profile features from the top panel buttons and touchscreen interface, without having to use the menu too much for special features.

Overall photo experience

X-T200 felt like a good to great experience and easy learning curve of the functionality and features.

I was impressed with its great photo quality, especially I got a high percentage of shots while trying macro shots in direct or indirect sunlight.

Video quality was good. I have a sample 4K and FullHD recording, and 4K shows way better results than Full HD. My only remark is that I used only one FPS option from the multitude available. From the screen of the camera, it did not look that bad.

24MP APSC sensor same as from older version of cameras like Xpro3

Photo profiles

Special Profiles or Photo Modes

From the dial, I tested a bit more than others with SR, SP(Night, Portrait, Trail, Sunset) and Adv profiles.

SP Sunset profile

I don’t know if it’s me for loving sunsets, but from the SP profile, I was most impressed with the Sunset profile. I added those photos in LuminarAI and tried to tweak with them a bit, still I could not do much better than what the camera succeeded. The sun colors really steal the eyes.

Trail light

For shooting long shutter exposure of moving lights during the night, like traffic. I found that I needed to setup an additional configuration in the profile menu of the panel. This is when the menu got too complicated for me to shoot trail light and switched to the old fashion manual way with Bulb exposure considering time and cold outside. I did not get another night with the camera to try it out.

Automatic profiles

SR and Adv profiles

also did a great job most of the times for choosing the right profile for the shot I wanted to take. They don’t add any special configuration on top of the other profiles, just makes the shooting experience a better and faster shootinng experience for the user, because not having to go to the menu for getting the right shot.

Night Photo Shots

For a beginner on Fujifilm cameras, I found that night photos were especially hard to get to look nice out of the box, even with the Special night shot profiles for traillight, fireworks and night shot. It took some changes in the menu, like shutting off the long exposure noise reduction to get more out of the camera.

I had to tweak a few times with the shutter exposure time settings, and this was not available from inside the touchscreen, but from inside the advanced menu.

If I would have been sufficiently satisfied with the shutter settings for night shots I would have experimented more with bracketing and HDR settings then with the aperture priority during for checking the bokeh.

I could have combined in photoshop photos of multiple exposure values low, medium, high shutter speeds, in order to get the most out of the shot and mix the result with multiple exposures of trail light function to get the most color dynamics and light as I could from a bland street and building shot, still, I did not do that at the time.

The camera could have done more than my actual result, but certainly it would have required a bit more tweaking than I had time for.

Night shot noise reduction

I lost a lot of good shots because of this noise reduction feature being too much to get a picture. The better results I got from the camera during the night were on par or lower than an iPhone 12 Pro Max. I still feel I could have done a bit more tweaking from inside the advanced menu for better night shots, still I did not have a lot of time spared for shooting at night and tweaking with them for the perfect exposure. Cameras like the Canon beginner DSLR like 850D will have less Noise reduction in the out-of-camera JPEG.

Low light, ISO performance is awesome in most shots, unless you are using the noise reduction from the camera. In built camera noise reduction is activated by an on/off switch, non customizable, and does a horrible job at masking noise and helping in dark situations. I consider all the shots lost.

I got overall much better quality shots when shooting on tripod.

Look and feel

Touchscreen

The screen is a 3 million dots 3.5″screen, which is more than enough for this camera. It has a 16:9 ratio.

The touchscreen is hinged to the camera with a 3 axis joint. The touch interface is very responsive to and the colors are quite good, giving a lot of confidence of the quality of the end result.

The second screen is the Electronic view finder, which has a resolution of around 3 million pixels. It is ok.

Ergonomics – Buttons, menus and touchscreen

After taking a photo, I find it useful to check out the result to check if I need to reshoot. Unfortunately the photo does not show up on the screen for a long time, not even a second at times. I did not find this easily in the menus, so always had to press the photo media button to go back to the last photo for a quick review. The media button is easily accessible in the back panel. This is pretty annoying as this was just the first few days with the camera and I wanted to see the result for most of the shots I took.

Photo quality and speed

Shooting speed is 8 fps with short buffer. Feels a bit gutted when shooting panorama bursts or when subjects are moving or you just want to compensate missing internal IBIS. For me, it was a big upgrade still, comparing with an old Nikon D7000 which did up to 5fps,

Photo profiles

Bracketing Provia, Velvia, Classic Neg are good profiles to start with in the Fuji world, also there are some black and white profiles giving great results in high contrast shots and portraits. The least amount of differences between these profiles will be visible when you shoot less colored objects or landscape.

To test with multiple profiles, in the camera Menu, you even have an option to choose bracketing shots with 3 color profiles you can set to your personal preference and see which color or black and white profile suits best to your style of photography. I think this is an especially great option to have on a photo camera for beginners and amateurs alike, as they have the instant option to check what could be the best color photos out of the camera without too much tweaking on the PC or Phone.

Bracketing samples

Sample stills Portrait, Landscape

Video

Full HD(1080p) – All video resolution modes will deliver no crop video, still, when shooting Full HD(1080p), you will see the quality of the footage is a bit soft.

Full HD videos are possible for shots up to 120 fps

4k 30 fps – videos are sharp and full of color, stabilization works well while on the move and having the camera handheld pointed to your face. I was quite impressed with the capability of Vlog camera it has when it is paired with the kit lens 15-45mm as it is quite wide at the low end.

Sample video

Video is a multi shot mix of Full HD, 4K footage shot with the camera during sunset.

Firmware update

Editing video and photo workflow is the same as with any other camera when using LuminarAI, GIMP or Lightroom.

When comparing Fujifilm X-T200, with other entry level mirrorless and even DSLR cameras, on paper, this camera ha a lot going for it and checked a lot of the boxes for users within this budget.

Competition

DSLR	EOS Rebel SL3 (EOS 250D)
Mirrorless	Fujifilm X-A7, Canon M200, Canon M50 or Canon M50 II
Point and shoot	Panasonic DMC-TZ100, Sony ZV-1

Conclusion

Now, just thinking about it, we take a lot for granted the advances that smartphone cameras have made over the past decade. Looking at photos from back when 2MP was top of the range phone camera, a huge improvement is visible.

This is not the case anymore, with phone manufacturers using larger sensors with less noise and more megapixels to be able to have a workable file in post processing. This is where phones caught up with cameras. And I can see that, regardless of the manufacturer, there is not one capable of getting the same results with out of the box, out of camera jpg like phones do.

Phones users don’t have to mind, AF, bracketing, shutter speed, white balance, aperture and get decent results and all the interaction is done in one screen.

Now, phones are good enough for the average person, for uploading on social media or sharing the photos digitally. There is a noticeable difference between phone and a big sensor camera when you crop the photo, even without tweaking and editing it to get more color or luminosity end result of photo and videos from a phone