The FujiFilm X100VI Camera
A point-and-shoot camera to give you that Eggleston look …
Two decades ago, at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, an executive of Fujifilm, the Tokyo company that at the time was known for its superb film but not much else, told your columnist that Fujifilm intended to become the third-leading high-end Japanese camera brand, after Nikon and Canon.
It seemed a bit optimistic, to say the least. Fuji Photo had been making decent cameras since the 1950s, but they were not particularly distinguished or popular. And anyway, this being the turn of the century, it was becoming clear that film was on the way out, so it seemed unlikely that Fuji’s star was rising.
The most interesting thing about Fuji was the gruesome but colorful fact that one of its executives had recently been hacked to death on his doorstep with a samurai sword after announcing that the company would no longer pay protection money to yakuza-style gangsters.
By and large, the prediction that Fuji would soon be as pre-eminent in cameras as the Big Two was not fulfilled. They went into digital and made (and still make) some very good equipment, but if you see a serious photographer not using Nikon, Canon, or Leica, they are less likely to have opted for Fujifilm than Sony, whose camera heritage was minimal.
There was one exception to Fuji’s competent but unremarkable cameras, which span from instant-photo, Polaroid-type products to professional-quality gear. In 2010, it unexpectedly announced an eccentric and splendid little camera, the X100, which stole this writer’s heart and won over a small but passionate contingent.
The X100 looked like a Leica M-model range finder, and although it had an optical finder, it was really a point-and-shoot camera with fully electronic autofocus. In a way, most everything about it was fake. It had a retro film camera’s styling but wasn’t at all based on a classic. The lens, which looks like you could swap it out for lenses with different focal lengths, is, in fact, fixed, and is equivalent to a 35-mm. gentle wide-angle.
So really, the original X100 and its now five successors—the most recent two designated by Roman numerals—are a bit of a gimmick. With the big exceptions that they are a joy to handle and the quality of the pictures they produce is fantastic. The fact that instead of resembling a paparazzo you look like you found your granddad’s little old 35-mm. camera and are trying it out makes you less conspicuous taking photos in public. As a result, you get better pictures.
The X100 series has built-in filters to replicate the look of all Fuji color and black-and-white films. And true to the spirit of kaizen, which means something like “constant improvement,” Fuji even keeps providing software updates for its older cameras. So if you don’t want to spend $1,599 on the new version 6 (the VI), you’ll probably be very happy with a V or earlier, as long as all the latest software is installed.
The X100 cameras are not the most user-friendly, to be honest. The menu systems are awkward; the instruction manuals, long and hard. But the VI is as exhilarating as the earlier models, with a few small improvements, such as a big, 40-megapixel sensor. Another caveat: they can be tough to get hold of. A little unexpectedly, TikTokers adopted the version V back in 2022, and demand for X100 cameras, which take great video, grew exponentially.
As for Fuji’s 20-year-old ambition for world domination, it’s still in abeyance, but the company continues to think big. Go to London, Sydney, or Mexico City to experience the first Fujifilm Houses of Photography, experiential stores in prime locations to help build the slowly developing cult.
The Creative Aurvana Ace 2 Earbuds
These earbuds may be before their time, but you can afford to lose them …
In the late fall of 2000, the respected Singaporean tech company Creative launched something that hadn’t been seen before: a digital music player, the Nomad Jukebox. It was a hefty machine, but no bigger than a Discman CD player, which was the gold standard for portable music players in its heyday. The Nomad Jukebox was O.K. but made little impact.
It was a classic case of being too early with a tech innovation. Less than a year later, Apple launched the iPod. It was a vastly better product, with the look of something otherworldly retrieved from a crashed U.F.O. And even though its launch timing, a few weeks after 9/11, wasn’t great, it totally eclipsed Creative’s effort.
I have a bad feeling that Creative may have done something similar with these superb new wireless earbuds, the Aurvana Ace 2. They use a new form of solid-state driver—that’s the miniature speaker found in all headphones—developed in Santa Clara, California, over a long period by a company called xMems. While regular drivers have moving parts that shift air physically to create sound, xMems drivers rely instead on the piezoelectric effect. This makes them faster to respond—thus able to reproduce sound with more precision—and more robust.
This may seem like a small step for tech, but it could turn out to be a big deal. Although, because Creative isn’t such a well-known name, the new Aurvana Ace and its slightly superior brother, the costlier ($20) Aurvana Ace 2, appear to have gone under the radar. The only people talking about them currently are one or two high-end-audio reviewers, who are particularly ecstatic about the Ace 2.
The sound from the Ace 2 is exceptionally refined. It has little of the massive audio heft of this column’s current favorite, the Between 3ANC, from Brooklyn’s Status Audio, nor the terrific sound and premium quality of New York meisters Master & Dynamic’s in-ear cans. They’re not massively loud, but they have a delicate precision quality that (after letting the driver break in for an hour or so) almost took this reviewer’s breath away. The one drawback is that despite having an appealing, shiny look, they have quite a cheap physical quality.
Both Aurvana models are a lot less expensive than regular-quality earphones—the official cost of the Ace 2 is $150, but it was down to $130 on Amazon in no time. At that price, when you inevitably leave them in the seat pocket on a flight, it will merely spoil your day a little rather than ruin it.
The Punkt MC02 Cell phone
A Swiss-made “dumbphone” for the tinfoil-hat wearer in your life …
The Swiss cell-phone company Punkt is as much of an outlier in consumer technology as Switzerland itself.
For many years, the company has been alone in producing stylish “dumbphones,” which are designed for sophisticates who text and have phone conversations but don’t have any interest in Instagramming everything they eat or sharing any part of their private life on social media, especially when doing so is ultimately for the benefit of tech companies who capitalize on your personal data.
Yet Punkt now makes a smartphone, the MC02, expressly for privacy-concerned users. This may sound like french fries for dieters, but they seem to have covered every angle of using most smartphone functions without giving away personal data. Principally, the operating system is not iOS, and while it is Android-based, it’s a fine-tuned Swiss variant on Android called Apostrophy, which you must pay around $20 a month to use. But for that you get your data stored on servers in Switzerland, and features such as a built-in V.P.N. to stay private when you travel and a dashboard on the phone to show how much data you are emitting at any given time.
Punkt knows the MC02 is a niche product. You need to care a lot about privacy to sacrifice much of the convenience and fun of an iPhone or a good conventional Android. There’s unlikely to be a tangible benefit other than the satisfaction of making a principled stand.
It’s not that the Punkt MC02 is a hair-shirt, Puritan gadget. There’s even a sectioned-off area where you can buy apps from the Google Play Store and use them safely. But while it’s a good phone that takes photos and all that, it’s still by intention not the device 99.9 percent of us use to give money voluntarily to big tech companies.
The Austrian Audio MiCreator System Set
A microphone set that will help you make podcasts the whole world could be listening to …
This writer has no idea how people fit listening to podcasts and reading blogs into their schedule. How they find time to make podcasts and write blogs is even more of a mystery.
In the past week or two, I have been asked by one friend if I’d read his latest blog. “No, I missed that,” I said, without mentioning that I’ve never read his blog or even knew he had one. Another acquaintance announced in a London pub that she had just come from recording her podcast. Finding it hard to imagine what she had to say in a podcast, I asked how many people were known to be in her audience. “Oh, about 50,000,” she replied. Your columnist’s jaw remains on the floor.
If you are of the podcasting persuasion, despite the skepticism of friends like your columnist, this miniature, portable set of studio-quality USB-C microphones from Austrian Audio—one main host’s mike, one satellite mike for interviewees (or to record stereo)—will be a delight.
The design, look and feel, and build quality are exemplary, as is the sound they produce. They can also be used for recording your own music … if you really must.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology