I've had the Fujifilm X100VI for about a month now, shooting alongside my 5D mk.II, and I have thoughts. Some of them good. Some of them the kind you get after spending that much money on a camera and realising it has genuinely annoying quirks that reviewers glossed over because it's pretty and has good film simulations.

// what it gets right

The image quality is genuinely stupid good for the size. The 40MP sensor in this thing has no right to produce files that clean — I've been shooting at ISO 3200 and the noise structure is more film grain than digital mush, which pairs with the film sims in a way that makes you feel like a photographer even when you're just shooting your coffee. The in-body stabilisation is the other thing. It works. Handheld at 1/15s, sharp enough to use. On a fixed lens compact. Mental.

Sample image from the X100VI, showing a street scene in Mallorca with vibrant colors and good dynamic range (make sure you turn off CRT to see it properly).

The fixed 35mm (equivalent) focal length sounds limiting on paper. In practice it forces you to move your feet, think about framing before you lift the camera, and stop pixel-peeping from 50 different focal lengths. A month in and I'm thinking in 35mm. That's either a skill or a coping mechanism. Probably both.

I picked up the camera and immediately went on a trip to a local mountain range, out of the box it was a joy to shoot with, the dials are tactile and well-placed and the JPEGs look fantastic straight out of camera. However when I bought it I was most excited about the Film simulations, When I tried these out I was super underwhelmed, was this really what everyone was raving about? They look so plain. It wasn't until I got home that I figured out that I had to input them all myself, and I could only have 8 set-up at any one time. Once I got some saved from Fuji X Weekly, I could see the hype was justified, my personal favourite is Cubance. For a casual shooter or someone who values image quality without the hassle of changing lenses, this camera is a dream.

// where it lets you down

The autofocus is the elephant in the room. It's better than the V, sure, but "better than the V" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. In good light on a stationary subject it's fine. Anything moving, anything in low contrast, anything where the camera has to make a decision — it hesitates. You can feel it thinking. For street and casual shooting it mostly keeps up, but compare it to what Sony or Canon are doing at this price and it's not close. My 5D mk.II from 2008 has more decisive AF on a single-point lock than this thing does in tracking mode. That's a sentence I did not expect to type.

The menu system is the other one. Fuji's menus have been bad for a decade and they remain bad. Finding the thing you want to change requires either memorising where Fuji buried it or spending four minutes pressing Q and hoping. The physical controls are great — aperture ring, shutter dial, exposure comp dial — but the moment you need to go into a menu you remember you're on Fuji time.

And it runs warm. Not unusably hot, but warm enough that you notice it in your hand during a long shoot. Whether that matters to you depends on what you're doing with it.

// tl:dr

I know it's an old camera, but nothing has made me feel the need to leave my trusty 5D mk. II at home until now. The X100VI is the first camera in years that has made me want to shoot more, especially a camera that has a fixed lens, and that's worth something. If you value image quality and a compact form factor, and can live with the AF quirks and menu system, it's a fantastic choice. If you need a workhorse that can keep up with fast action or low light without hesitation, you might want to look elsewhere.