I own 4 Fujifilm cameras and personally, I'd recommend being VERY careful and thinking hard about this purchase. This isn't the same Fujifilm as it used to be. The company was once known for its "Kaizen" approach, which has long since disappeared. Prices are now inflated because they're riding on popularity. Autofocus in Fuji is simply weak.
The question is whether you actually need such a camera for anything. With a new smartphone that has multiple lenses, out-of-the-box photos will turn out MUCH NICER than from a camera, because initial processing is built into the software. Digital cameras don't have this. You need to take RAW and work pretty hard on it to make the photo look as good as what a smartphone delivers right away.
In tourist destinations, you can often find middle-aged guys running around with huge cameras when in reality most of their photos are quite poor. Because they don't realize that with a regular phone, their pictures would be much nicer.
> The question is whether you actually need such a camera for anything. With a new smartphone that has multiple lenses, out-of-the-box photos will turn out MUCH NICER than from a camera, because initial processing is built into the software. Digital cameras don't have this. You need to take RAW and work pretty hard on it to make the photo look as good as what a smartphone delivers right away.
You’re completely neglecting to highlight Fuji’s film simulations. I use Fuji’s specifically because they produce excellent jpgs out of camera. Not really sure where your take is coming from, an xt3 on auto will blow any smartphone picture FAR out of the water.
This is not true. Yes, these are characteristic color grading profiles, but if you want your photo to actually look proper, you still need to process the RAW file and you can add the Fujifilm profile as an extra on top of that.
There's NOTHING special about these profiles. It's a matter of taste. If you're buying a mirrorless camera, it means you have ambitions to take photos at a reasonably high level. Nobody who wants to be at a high level will shoot JPGs.
It’s true that phones cameras are miracles of technology, especially considering their size. But I take a modern Fuji traveling because the modern phone camera look is so over-processed and distinct. There’s no faking the real optics a large aperture and sensor gives, the portrait mode on phones is still a poor imitation of the real thing.
Fuji then has the whole film simulation system with all their colour science from the last century. It’s a ton of fun, and the jpgs it produces are distinct and beautiful, and I believe better than 99% of people could achieve from post processing the raws, myself included.
The middle-age guy part is accurate though, I got it as a thirtieth present.
I don’t find this at all, even compared to my (now rather old) X-T1.
For quick shots to remember an event or night out, modern phone cameras are fine.
For anything that I’d call photography and actually want to print, display, etc. I rarely if ever get results I’m really happy with from a phone camera.
If you’re in any way interested in photography beyond taking a few snaps at parties and on holidays, I highly recommend getting a real camera. I’ve found the Fuji system to be great, from the lenses to the out of camera JPEGs and film simulations that mean you can pretty much avoid doing any significant editing or post-processing if, like me, you find that all quite tedious.
Yes, if someone's goal is to learn photography and they're also interested in it from a technical point of view, then these are definitely cameras worth considering. My main point is that if someone just wants to "take nice photos" they should seriously think about whether to buy a good phone instead.
This aligns with my experience as well. The bigger sensor does generate pictures that look more crisp in big prints or zoomed in. In theory it should gather more light, but in reality, phones stitch together multiple exposures, and frequently produce nicer low light images without much noise. For sharing on social media, it's hard to notice a difference. For me its event worse with the x100 since the wide lens doesn't have that signature compression and depth of field, so the photos don't really stand out that much, no wonder most x100 photographers rely on color filters (film sims) and high contrast to draw attention.
Here you're talking about shallow depth of field which is desirable for portraits. But show me a camera that will have in JPG the dynamic range that you have in a smartphone by default? Show me a camera that will have as LARGE depth of field as smartphones have thanks to their small sensor.
These are all pros and cons depending on the scenario, but a phone has one advantage - it's small and you have it always with you.
Not sure what you mean by produce, it depends on lighting and photographer skill. Not like the 23mm is really a portrait lens either and f/2 isn't spectacular.
I'm not sure what causes the terrible RAF handling in Lightroom, but it's a fairly well-known issue. Lightroom produces so-called "worming" and apparently this is related to the X-Trans sensor which requires a different decoding algorithm. On my end, I can recommend Capture One - the handling here is perfect, though you do have to get used to the UI unfortunately
THAT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING THAT COULD WORK. Does anyone have an idea or know of a 100% digital alternative? I work in different locations, so using a printer isn't an option
I am working on my app to break tasks down into smaller tasks (you can see it in the video at the end of the article). I think I will release it in the next few weeks :)
Create 2+ distinct LinkedIn profiles optimized for maximum SEO. No generalizations - focus on highly specific skills (omit irrelevant ones). Do not duplicate names, for example, use only the first initial in one case (must be real but not a 1:1 copy of another account). Fully complete the profiles (100%), adding comments and tags wherever possible. Then, prepare an epic CV that stands out from others (if someone has 100 CVs on their desk, they should pick yours without even reading it).
My experience is that sending out CVs and searching for job postings didn't yield any results in my case. All the recruitment processes I've been through came from someone finding my LinkedIn profile and reaching out with a job offer. So, if you have general skills but lack specialized ones, I think the best approach is to tailor your profile to specific job offers and wait for someone to contact you.
I've never done more than 1 profile myself because I have just one strong skill —good knowledge of SQL Server — and my profile is built around that. If I had more skills, I wouldn't list them all, instead, I'd precisely target specific job postings.
Besides SQL Server, I obviously know the basics of other things and have decent general IT knowledge, but I don't mention those skills on my CV or LinkedIn at all.
Simply treat your profile and CV like you're optimizing a website for SEO, targeting specific keywords. That's my advice.
Imagine an average recruiter from a foreign country looking for candidates for a specific position. Make your profile in a way that, first, it appears in their suggestions (through the algorithm/keywords), and second, when they visit it, even without deep IT knowledge, they can easily see that you're a fitting candidate for the role they're trying to fill.
In my opinion, all companies that have some kind of "investor" always end up the same way: eventually, a paid sociopath is installed as CEO whose only goal is profit maximization. If the CEO were someone who valued noble ideals or principles above profit, the investors would quickly replace them with a more "optimal" person.
Your perspective is a common myth, as in business ones reputation and integrity ultimately determine the formalized credibility of your firm. This is true with consumers, supply chains, customs bond subprograms, and your partners.
i.e. people can only lie, cheat, and steal from people for a finite amount of time. It ultimately leads to competitive disadvantage, and repercussions.
In general many VC/Angle "investors" were just predatory loan scams, that could ultimately destroy the founders firm. Warning signs often include proposals to table personal assets, share dilution scams, equity siphon holes, and stock market IPO legal cons.
Using debt to grow is generally a bad long-term strategy, and positive cash flow is always king at any scale. If the firm can't make sales, than growth is just a fools errand.
In my opinion, the Zuckerberg story ruined a generation of business people. =3
> i.e. people can only lie, cheat, and steal from people for a finite amount of time. It ultimately leads to competitive disadvantage, and repercussions.
That’s why you use you initial limited window to establish conditions where you don't need to compete, remembering competitive disadvantage a non-concern.
I am unsure that a debt-laden firm with half-baked IP and zero revenue is much of a prize for bandits. lol
I have seen it happen, but usually irrational "winners" also evidentially become losers in a year or two. I think it is related to folks that compulsively gamble on other peoples ignorance, and eventually end up losing in court.
It is theoretically not impossible to "win" as a bandit, but the collateral financial damage to the people around you would be significant. Thus, the mean time before collapse would be proportional to the specified credit.
It’s really a trade-off. If you raise too much money, you have to at least on paper show growth. All the levers then are tuned for growth.
On the other hand, you risk loosing out in the market if you raise just enough to build a viable product and get initial customers with the goal of growing organically.
Market rewards the winners. Look at Wiz, they captured the cloud security market by raising huge capital and moving fast.
Open source route is probably the way to go if you want to build a product based on your foundational ideas. Helps drive adoption organically and hopefully discover a monetisation opportunity.
I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.
It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual).
I've been working within the Microsoft tech stack for around 25 years now (mostly SQL Server). I used to be a huge fan of their products because they were one of the best companies when it came to developer experience (developers! developers!). Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Things are very different now. Of all the things I once liked, only SQL Server really remains (ironically, it's a technology they acquired - it used to be Sybase). I still think C#, F#, and PowerShell are great, but I actively discourage people from using most of their so-called "products" because the quality is just appallingly low.
Even something like Visual Studio is better replaced with Rider + LINQPad. Their GitHub repositories are full of open issues that have been dragging on for years. There's virtually nothing left of the old Microsoft that I still respect or admire.
That said, I have to admit that most other corporations aren't any better - there's a general trend of maximizing profit while offering the lowest quality that customers are still willing to tolerate. If I were starting IT studies today, I would go 100% down the open-source path.
I'm a Macbook user, but I often have screen sharing experiences with people using Windows laptops, god, it's painful watching them. Brand new, solid book with decent specs, only used for few months and everything is visibly very slow. Opening some documents and presentations while being on screen share takes minutes, file explorer lags, screen compositor lags. Notifications with weather, STOCKS info, murders and clickbait news around just pop up mid-conferences.
The most funny part? I was debugging application .exe not starting. Reason? AVG antivirus UPLOADED EXE to their server for EXAMINATION. EXE with an 600$ Extended Validation license. There was a message for the user TO WAIT FEW HOURS before they studied it and exe could be unblocked from launching. All was completely normal to the said windows user. What a dystopian thing they are used to
I think letting certain software thrive which just blatantly disregards your own certification and validation processes is exactly Windows problem. Some developer(s) paid 600$ and emailed their passport to Microsoft affiliates to get rid of that "SmartScreen" warning, do they have to pay and email their passport copy to AVG as well so their application can be ran without uploading step and needing to wait few hours of "examination"?
Windows historically allowed a dire situation with security, so no-one really freaking knows what software is safe and what not. Even monopoly they have on deciding what software is safe and what is not (extended validation certification procedure) is not helping anyone, because anyone can circumvent it with photoshop and 10$
Are you saying Microsoft shouldn't care about making a secure system and they can just outsource the subject to a third company which will upload .exe to their server and tell user to wait few hours before it can be launched?
I use Pages as my default word processor. It doesn’t have all of Word’s features but I seldom need them, and it’s much faster than Word. I highly recommend it.
Same. I use Word only to edit Word files that I have to send back to someone outside my company. That's not often for me. Pages is vastly better for every other use case I have.
Numbers used to be painfully slow. It was just maybe 3 years ago or so it improved a lot. It was practically unusable for large spreadsheets. I swear spreadsheets from 20 years earlier performed better on much slower hardware. If you haven't used Numbers for a few years, maybe give it another try.
Also shout out to Keynote which is the best presentation software. PowerPoint is so clunky in comparison. Nice features like making image backgrounds transparent are huge wins.
Pages is also pretty nice. Its definitely enough for home usage, and if my colleagues could read the pages files natively I would find it completely sufficient for professional use. I find it does layout much better than MS Office. Which honestly is a much bigger concern for home users: professional users will just switch to professional layout tools when they need it, but Sam doesn't need that cost/complexity for some bake sale fliers.
Numbers can also be nicer for home use cases, but is a bit weird if you're used to excel. And unlike pages or keynote quickly hits upper limits on complexity. I would never use numbers in a professional setting.
Meanwhile Microsoft removed WordPad in the latest version of Windows 11. It was a great simple word processor and text editor. It even supported docx and odt files.
Numbers has it's issues as well. I have to open .csv files dozens if not hundreds of times a day - always the same format. Numbers will not allow me to default to freezing the first/header column or _not_ show the formatting sidebar on open. I have to set the freeze header option and close the sidebar every time.
At this point, I've started using IDE extensions when I just need to view/filter
If you’re doing it often enough, you might benefit from using AppleScript to automate opening it in an app and changing setting . Not ideal, but it’ll make it a lot less annoying.
Microsoft's free web app office suite is a slimmed down, quick version of Office that does most of the stuff most users want most of the time, for the cases where Pages or Google Docs would also suffice.
The alternative to the full office suite with decades of backwards compatibility and hundreds of features, is the quick, free version Microsoft made to fight off Google Docs.
> A recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.
And yet, weirdly, macOS comes up with absolutely no image editor of any kind. There's no equivalent of MS Paint. It's infuriating.
yeah preview can do more than it appears it can do.
quicktime pro was like that. it was insanely powerful and things were all hidden behind just a few menu items and a few little added UI elements here and there. quicktime pro was amazing and I miss it a bit.
yeah I was surprised to find myself donwloading gimp for image editing. However, Microsofts modern paint (paint3d? I dont remember what they call it) is atrocious imo so I can't really fault apple.
The question is whether you actually need such a camera for anything. With a new smartphone that has multiple lenses, out-of-the-box photos will turn out MUCH NICER than from a camera, because initial processing is built into the software. Digital cameras don't have this. You need to take RAW and work pretty hard on it to make the photo look as good as what a smartphone delivers right away.
In tourist destinations, you can often find middle-aged guys running around with huge cameras when in reality most of their photos are quite poor. Because they don't realize that with a regular phone, their pictures would be much nicer.