The revival of the enthusiast camera sector over the past few years has been a surprising but welcome development in the industry. The widespread acclaim for the Panasonic LX3 has encouraged other manufacturers to join or re-enter the fray with high-end offerings of their own, resulting in excellent, high-spec cameras such as the Samsung TL500, Olympus XZ-1 and Canon S95.
Now it's time for Fujifilm to play its hand, which it has done with its X10. Conceptually it borrows our favorite features from the two distinct sub-types that have emerged in this category - it takes the fast lens from cameras such as the TL500 and XZ-1 and combines it with the optical viewfinder and extensive controls of the Canon G12 and Nikon P7100. Just to finish things off, Fujifilm wraps the whole thing in magnesium alloy bodywork that evokes its big brother, the X100 and the 1960's rangefinders it borrowed its styling from.
The X10's innards are as progressive as its exterior is staid. It features a 12MP, '2/3" type' sensor, which means it's between 26% and 40% larger than the sensors used by its enthusiast compact peers and twice as large as those used in almost all regular compacts. It also uses the company's unique 'EXR' technology that makes it easy to combine pairs of pixels to produce 6MP images that have either been averaged to reduce noise or differently exposed so that more highlight information is captured. The underlying chip uses conventional CMOS arrangement, rather than the back-side illuminated type that can help improve light capture in small sensors.
