Vintage Digital again. You know, my most recent cameras are so good that these days I see myself returning again and again to old digital classics.

This time need not buy one from the second hand market. One day I woke up and realized I still have a Fujifilm X10 sitting on a shelf, gaining dust.

The X10 is a real digital classic and, like so many members from this exclusive club, it was underrated and long forgotten.

Fujifilm

Time and again, I expressed my admiration for Fujifilm. How they were able to carve their own path and stand distanced from the rest, with style and class, with quiet old money finesse.

While the rest of the industry was sprinting towards more megapixels, high ISOs and fast bokehlicious lenses, Fujifilm sat back, poured a glass of whiskey and decided to achieve all this with elegance, becoming an icon altogether.

If you’ve ever held a Fuji X camera, you know it. It has charming retro looks. It is cold, made of magnesium alloy and wrapped in a texture that feels like it belongs on a 1960s Leica. In a world of disposable gadgets, Fuji X cameras look the part.

This is how the X10 was born, in 2011.

X10

Essentially, a point & shoot. But a serious one, tempting you to leave your serious DSLR at home.

The X10 has a 12MP 2/3-inch EXR sensor, larger than the ones found in other ordinary point & shoots. A high quality zoom lens, a useful 28-112mm f/2.0 – f/2.8 with a mechanical, non-motorized zoom ring.

An old-school clear glass optical viewfinder to compose your shots. PASM modes for full-auto or full-manual control. Plenty of bells and whistles with some fancy shooting modes. And good image quality for such a small camera.

All enclosed in a beautifully designed, charming looking camera.

What’s not to like?

The twist

One of the highlights of the X10 is the beautifully designed lens. The 2/3 inch sensor allowed Fuji to design a small pancake-like retractable lens. The lens is actually very well built and feels really good in your hands, all in metal.

And here is the twist, pun intended: there is no power button on the X10. To wake it up, you grab the lens barrel and twist. That’s how you turn on the camera.

That mechanical click is the greatest camera startup felling in digital history. It’s a physical handshake. You aren’t just pressing an electronic button, you’re engaging mechanically with a camera. A clever design from Fuji.

Using the X10

In this specs-oriented world, fortunately there are hobbyists passionate about photography as an art-form. And camera geeks who are capable of identifying a good camera beyond specs. Modesty apart, I’m one of them and I did get an X10 when it was released.

I’m not going to romanticize the experience using this camera. I could write a bunch of nice words to go along the camera’s classic looks. But that would be total horseshit.

Turning it on without pressing a button does make you feel you are not dealing with an electronic gadget. Same to the manual zoom ring, it does give you a tactile experience. Then there are the perfectly machined dials on top of the body, exposure compensation dial included.

Looking through the X10’s viewfinder is an exercise in pure romance. Objectively, it’s a dumb tunnel of glass, although a very clear one that adjusts itself as you zoom.

There is no info overlay: it doesn’t tell you shutter speed or aperture. It doesn’t show you the focus point. It just shows you the world and only 85% of it – hardly a solid frame coverage. It’s all very nice and beautiful for marketing fanfare, but you will end up shooting with the back screen.

Nonetheless, all this combined and yes, the X10 does feel a lot more like a traditional camera than an ordinary point & shoot.

But let’s not stretch things here. Shooting with the X10 is not the same as shooting with, say, an X-100, X-E or X-Pro. It’s not in that league. Don’t let its classic looks deceive you.

Image quality

Don’t expect much in terms of dynamic range. We are dealing with 15 year old technology and a limited 2/3 inch sensor. My tip is simple: the old school method of underexposing to get as much highlights as possible, which are more difficult to recover than shadows.

In the X10 there is something called EXR modes. I’m not writing in detail here, if you’re untested you can Google search. Essentially a bunch of presets designed to optimize image quality based on scene detection. I’ve never explored those, to be honest. I guess it’s nothing unachievable through shooting RAW and editing manually in post.

The funny thing is that at present, in 2026, you can use AI gimmicks like Denoise from Lightroom or whatever available tool and salvage once noisy and unacceptable outputs.

Provided you get RAW files, which is one of the good things the X10 has to offer.

Talking of which, the photos you see here were shot over 10 years ago. I retrieved some unedited RAW files and gave them a run in Lightroom using 2026 technology.

It’s actually an interesting exercise, massaging old files with new technology.

Reworking the RAW files in Lightroom exposed their age and limitation of the 2/3 inch sensor. The latitude of the editing parameters is much narrower compared to current 1-inch, APS-C, full frame or, well… medium format sensors. Hardly surprising, and not a fair comparison at all, I know.

Still – and this is the most important and impressive finding – the files are totally usable for 2026 standards.

The lens is actually very sharp across the focal length. I read somewhere that at the tele-end it drops the ball, but frankly I haven’t checked in detail. I don’t pixel peep much, even less so with a small camera like this one.

Considering this is a small 2/3 inch sensor camera dated 2011, the image quality is actually quite good.

Worth buying?

The looks of the camera per se are part of the X10‘s attractivity. Or, to some, its main raison d’être. Because this world is full of stylish people who may use a camera as a prop, a statement, for a certain appearance.

If this is your intent, then the X10 is indeed perfect for your classic cosplay style. This is a camera for that oh-so-stylish leather strap and leather half case. Go to a café, place the camera in the table alongside a notebook and a freshly brewed latte. You are a fucking artist.

Nonsense aside.

As a product, the X10 is a very interesting one. I do consider it a viable alternative for those who want to carry something light without compromising too much on the photo experience and quality. You can use it either for your casual snapshots or something more serious as the available manual controls will not hamper your creativity.

Why underrated

Because there were alternatives for the X10. The camera is similar in size to Olympus Pen series – just to name one – which are overall better cameras with a similarly retro-chic design. In fact, many Micro 4/3 cameras would eat the X10 for breakfast.

Furthermore, people tried to measure the X10 with a ruler. They saw the small 2/3-inch sensor, despised it and moved on. This is the consumer market reality: bigger is always better, no matter what. We went from small sensors to APS-C to full-frame. And now medium format is becoming popular.

‘Nuff said.

So why is the X10 a classic

Because it has flaws. It has parallax error. But it felt like a proper camera. And it was Fuji’s attempt to sell a serious fixed lens camera with a zoom. There were not so many back then, and not so many now as well.

As of 2026, the only similar camera I can think of is the Lumix LX100 series or its German counterpart, the Leica D Lux 7 and 8, with a Micro 4/3 sensor. Yet these newer cameras have a motorized zoom, killing the whole experience.

With hindsight, perhaps the X10 was simply technically not good enough. The classic good looks, the manual ring of the lens, those features were not strong enough to overcome the handicap of a smallish sensor. And the optical finder was not to be taken seriously.

In 2013, Fuji launched the X20, which was perhaps what the X10 should have been. It was essentially the same camera, with the same lens and body, but now with information overlay in the OVF and a new X-Trans sensor.

Then finally, in 2014, the X30. Still the same lens and sensor, but with a redesigned camera body featuring now a much needed EVF, more dials and buttons to enhance direct controls, including an additional lens ring to adjust aperture .

The X30 was the last iteration of this series and was sold not only in black, but also in a a sexy silver version. It didn’t sell that well, did not get much attention. But it is slowly becoming a collector’s item, which explains its current price point in the second hand market.

So the X10, while not being the camera it could or should have been, still deserves appreciation for what it was and what it pretended to be. If not perfect, at least it opened the path for its subsequent iterations, ending with the solid X30 that is on its path to earn a cult status.