This year, the Fujifilm X70 is turning 10 years old. I reviewed it for the Phoblographer back in February of 2016, and to this day, I’m still blown away at what it was capable of doing. In so many ways, I wish that cameras could easily make images that looked like that so long ago. But instead, it feels like sensors have made too many sacrifices to always shoot at high ISOs instead of lower ISO settings. Back then, I believed that sensors had so much color depth and richness to them that’s more or less gone these days — and that’s really sad.
So with that said, is a 10-year-old camera still really good? In many ways, I’d say yes. The way that they rendered light feels like what medium format does today. If you were to sit here and do lab tests, you’d probably see differences from a lab perspective. But they can’t translate well to a visual perspective. I mean, how can the Sony a7R III have a better sensor than the Sony a7R V, according to DXO Mark?
I say this for many reasons. Sometimes I switch back to my older cameras still around: which means my Sony a7 original and my Canon EOS R. Both of them still make images that are incredible and that really make me sit and stare at what’s being put out. In fact, I can’t wait until the 2030s when that era of photography is bound to come back into style because that’s when all the images were really, really rich and vivid in an organic way.
Sure, those cameras don’t have all the crazy scene detection modes. But I know how to use autofocus and to not totally rely on what the camera is trying to do. Instead, I made a ton of decisions for myself vs automating them.
That idea, perhaps more than anything else, is probably why I love images from older digital cameras so much. Creating with intentionality today, in contrast, seems like such a rarity.