I’ll be honest, the learning curve for moving to the Fujifilm X100VI has been fairly steep. Sure, I could have popped in a battery and made an image pretty easily. It’s not THAT different. But having used primarily Nikon equipment for over three decades, I know that system and the menu layouts pretty well. It’s second nature — and that’s how I need the Fujifilm to be. I need to become familiar enough with it that everything is second nature. I don’t want to be distracted by the differences in systems when I’m on a shoot where seconds count.

The good news is that this Fuji camera is very customizable. Yes, the menus are extensive and it can take some time to drill down to what you need, but there are lots of customizable function buttons that you can map your own features to so that you seldom even need to dive into menus. That’s my goal now — to get things customized and set up so that my most frequently needed features are available at the touch of a button.

Side-by-side Nikon/Fujifilm comparison

Before getting too deeply involved in that, though, I needed to make sure that the Fujifilm X100VI was up to the task of being somewhat of a replacement for my Nikon D850. It won’t replace it entirely, but if I’m on an international shoot where I can’t easily come back the next day to reshoot, I want to know that I can be confident in which body I use on a given day. If I decide to take only the Fuji out, I want to know that I’m not giving up any image quality just to have a smaller, lighter kit.

I went to my favorite test shooting location — the campus of the nearby University of Kansas — to test this out. Since the X100VI has the equivalent of a 35mm lens (in full-frame terms), I took it and my D850 with the 17-35mm lens. I wanted to shoot 35 to 35 to see how they compared. I do also have a prime 35mm for the Nikon, but I tend to use the zoom more when I travel and I find that it is at least as sharp as my prime in the Nikon system.

So here is the result of that test:

In this test, I wasn’t so interested in what additional “flavor” the Fuji could give me. I was primarily interested in whether it could match the quality of what I expected from my D850. I did only base processing to these two images, other than adding a bit of perspective correction to both. This is something that I would normally do on a shot like this so I wanted to test in a fairly real-world situation.

I was pleasantly surprised. Despite being a slightly smaller file size (the Fuji is 40mp while the Nikon is 48mp) and the Fuji being a physically smaller — not full frame — sensor, the two files were remarkable similar. The color is slightly different, especially in the blues, but that is something I could match in post if I wanted. In terms of sharpness, both are excellent. Is it possible the Fuji is even a tad sharper?

Here are a couple of crops at 100% to better see the detail:

A 100% crop of the Nikon file.

A 100% crop of the Fuji file.

I’m quite confident now that the Fuji is capable of providing (very) nearly the same quality of image as my Nikon D850. Now I just need to familiarize myself with it to the point that I don’t miss a shot due to operator error. I’ve already experienced a fair amount of that in my testing. Focus, especially, is something I wasn’t nailing 100% at first, but I’ve been tweaking those auto-focus and manual-focus settings and getting more confident in that regard.

One thing I have learned that I really like, is that when you’re in manual focus mode, you can still use the “focus/exposure lock” button on the back of the camera to quickly grab an autofocus lock. It’s a really nice way to quickly get in the ballpark of your desired focus, and then be able to tweak as needed manually to get the focus just where you want it. It saves the time of rolling the focus a long distance if you’re switching from a distant shot to a closeup.

Here are a few more test shots from the X100VI. I’m still just trying to work out the basics and see how it works in terms of street shooting vs. details, etc. I do like the look of the out-of-focus areas in closeups.

Next on my list of testing is to begin working with Fuji’s film simulations and learning to save my own “recipes” to the seven custom setting slots. I’ll start with some recipes others have already developed, and then begin working on my own variations. My goal is to shoot entirely with my own recipes and to develop specific recipes for the different locations I shoot in.