John Neil

In 2025, I decided it was time to invest in a true hybrid camera. After filming a summer road trip across the US, I wanted a better one-camera solution for photos and videos. While I have loved my trusty Fujifilm X-T4 , I knew it was time for a change.

Given that I already had a set of Fujifilm X-series lenses, the most logical choice was to look within their APS-C sensor-size ecosystem. And up until that point, I had been mostly happy with my Fujifilm photography gear, evangelizing the system whenever I had the opportunity.

However, it was also around this time that my faith in the brand began to weaken.

A 6-year frustration with their video auto-focus systems, constant supply problems, R&D time spent on releases of lifestyle and fashion cameras (x-half) instead of serious photography gear, along with growing reports of camera quality issues, left me feeling uncertain about spending more money on another new Fujifilm X camera.

So, I hesitantly decided to purchase their flagship at the time, the Fujifilm X-H2. I am a photography-first shooter, so this made more sense than the XH-2s, which is more video-focused. All that said, two thousand US dollars is a fair amount of money to spend on anything. And though I have loved Fuji, I also have to acknowledge that the autofocus problems on all their cameras were a real letdown. In addition, I have always felt their cameras felt subpar in manufacturing quality compared to brands like Nikon, Canon, and Sony. And, there was a significant part of me that wanted a camera that felt more physically confidence-inspiring. For those reasons, I was beginning to seriously consider changing brands.

So, when I bought the XH2, I told myself this:

For me, the XH-2 will either mark the beginning of a new era of investment in Fujifilm gear or the end.

Read on, and you shall discover the outcome.

Disclaimer

I do have some positive things to say about this camera. I have more very negative things to say about it. I doubt anyone from the Fujifilm imaging division will ever read this. But if they did, I would want them to know how much I appreciate their hard work. No camera is perfect. Every single one is designed with limitations and compromises. In my view, the failings of this camera look like failings of leadership, not a lack of effort from the individual contributors who designed it.

All photos in this article were shot with the X-H2, except the photos of the camera itself.

The Perfect Hybrid Travel Camera

On paper, the X-H2 was a perfect camera for me. And within the first few days of owning it, I found that I loved the images and classic Fuji rendering. What they have done with this sensor in terms of resolution, dynamic range, colors, grain, etc., is all absolutely incredible. And I think the image quality is something Fujifilm doesn’t get recognized enough for. In fact, it is so good that I have no complaints about it. The photos and videos that come out of the X-H2 are absolutely beautiful and stunning.

When I opened the box, it truly felt like a special Fujifilm camera. The buttons felt high quality. The rubber grip material was stickier and more reassuring than the grips on my X-T4. The EVF looked great.

The custom mode dial is awesome. Sure, the PASM method of camera interaction isn’t classically Fujifilm, but it is practical. And being able to swap the entire camera’s settings in less than a second with a single dial turn is incredibly fast and useful. C1 through C7 are also a lot of custom settings. More than most cameras offer, and that is well-appreciated.

In my view, it is a true hybrid camera. Switching from photos to videos to custom profiles of all kinds is easy and fast.

As anyone who has used a non-hybrid camera knows, changing between video and photo requires a lot of specific settings changes that can become quite cumbersome.

The XH2 handles this well.

I quite enjoyed the deep grip and solid feel of the camera.

The exterior material choices feel pretty decent.

And, that’s where the good ends.

I spent my Christmas vacation learning about the camera, getting my custom settings dialed in, and generally enjoying my first sessions shooting with it. Over the remaining months, I enjoyed the output and grew to appreciate some of the unique aspects of their flagship hybrid.

This, however, is where the good times ended.

The Reality of Day-to-Day Use

On paper, the Fujifilm X-H2 is a well-equiped and competent hybrid camera. Unfortunately, it falls short in dozens of small ways, making it utterly frustrating and unusable for me as my main camera.

Over the last year and a half, I have found myself disliking it more and more, with every new photography and video session leaving a slightly more bitter taste in my mouth.

I have been on planet Earth for 42 years. For 26 of those years, I have been a photography enthusiast. I have used, loved, and felt indifferent about dozens of cameras. This is the first camera I have come to absolutely loathe.

Things I REALLY dislike About the X-H2…

Command Dial Hell

Having shot with command dials (front and back) as the primary camera controls on Nikon, Canon, and Sony cameras, I cannot for the life of me understand what Fujifilm was thinking with their implementation of these controls on the X-H2.

Out of the box, the dials change their behavior depending on whether you are in manual, aperture-priority, or shutter-priority modes. The front command dial adjusts aperture in ‘A’ priority, and the front dial also adjusts shutter speed in ‘S’ priority. In manual mode, the front dial controls the aperture, and the rear dial controls the shutter speed. Also, they are configurable and customizable. The dials can also be used for exposure compensation and ISO.

This means, by default, whether you are in A, S, P, M, or C1-C2. The purpose of the dials are constantly changing. It’s a maddening design choice because it means you can’t build any muscle memory with the camera. I spent hours digging through the manual, forums, and talking to AI to get the rear dial to always be shutter speed in every mode. And even then, it still never quite worked the way I wanted; it was an utter waste of time.

While I appreciate that they wanted to make these controls customizable. You can, for example, set the rear dial to be iso. It’s a terrible design and implementation choice. In effect, any dial on the camera can control exposure compensation, ISO, shutter speed, or aperture, depending on the camera’s mode. An impossible combination to remember and use quickly and efficiently.

This might sound like a small gripe, but your muscle memory with a camera is extremely important for operation. I don’t expect them to design their camera the same way every other manufacturer does, but I do expect them to follow their own conventions and build a consistent system.

To put salt in the wound, they removed the press in buttons on the command dials… on their most expensive X camera. What?

ISO Controls

Speaking of dials, that brings me to ISO.

To change ISO, you press the ISO button, rotate the rear dial, then press again. The ISO menu that appears during this operation lists them vertically instead of horizontally. It isn’t clear which direction to turn the dial to increase or decrease the ISO value. In guessing, one might expect that turning the rear dial to the right would increase the ISO, since turning it to the right in other modes increases the shutter speed. Nope, it works in the opposite. I mess it up constantly, so eventually I went digging through the menus to see if I could change it. “Fantastic!”, I thought. It can be customized. So, I inverted it.

This also reversed the shutter speed behavior, making the shutter speed dial go backward. I gave up. The whole implementation is just trash.

Fujifilm, let me hold an ISO button down and rock the dial back with a left-to-right menu that clearly shows me what I am doing, then, when I release it, take me back where I was… shooting. Also, as you adjust the ISO, your exposure meter is hidden. So, you cannot see how your ISO changes are affecting exposure (other than to just watch the image get brighter or darker). I am changing my ISO to alter my exposure. That’s the entire point. Did any actual photographers test this camera before it was released? These are all fixable software issues. There was no reason to re-invent the wheel here—literally.

This might sound like me complaining or just nitpicking. But these are the controls for the exposure triangle: shutter speed, aperture, ISO. This is the technical side of photography. It is almost the entire purpose of a camera. You have to get this right on a professional, flagship camera. I’m sorry, you just do.

Ultimately, I ended up hating my physical interactions with the camera, preferring the X-T4 setup, where the top dials can be set for photography, and the two command dials can be used for video-only modes. It’s cleaner, simpler, and consistent. That’s pretty sad given that the X-H2 has all the potential to be far more usable for hybrid shooting. But in practice, it is worse in almost every way.

Nested Upon Nested Menus

I have never used a camera with great menus or a fantastic UI. Some are better than others. Nikon and Canon do pretty well overall. The X-H2 is the worst offender in this regard of any Fujifilm camera I have used (X-T1, X-T2, X-E2, X-E3, X-T4, X-H2). I won’t spend much time on this except to say there are too many options, too many customizations, and no way to know what the items are or what they affect. Yes, you can read the manual. I am an adult with a life. I do not have time to memorize the manual. I can look stuff up in the manual, and I do. If referencing the manufacturer’s documentation occasionally and regular use of the camera for 18 months doesn’t get me to a usable place, it’s a bad system.

My worst gripe about the menu system is that they provide you with a location to name your custom profiles. “Landscape”, “Urban”, “Graded”—whatever you want. Then, after you take all the time to name them, they proceed to never show you the names anywhere in the UI except the Q menu. As you change modes, C1-C7 appear on the rear screen, but no custom names are shown. I can see C1-C7 on the top dial; I have absolutely no need for that on the rear LCD. Show me the names you let me set, or don’t bother.

This is a 2-year-old, $2k camera on firmware version 5.0 at the time of this writing. It’s inexcusable.

Autofocus Problems

Autofocus: It never really ends with Fuji.

Face detection and video autofocus are significantly better than in previous camera versions. Unfortunately, the camera suffers from yet more software design failures. Getting the face and eye-detect autofocus to behave the way you want (to detect faces and keep tracking them… seems obvious) involves hours of playing with the combinations of settings in the following menus:

AF Mode

Focus Mode

AF-C Custom Setting

Tracking Speed

Tracking Sensitivity

FACE/EYE DETECTION SETTING

INSTANT AF SETTING

Release Focus Priority

This list should immediately tell you this was not well planned.

After hours of experimenting, manual reading, browsing Reddit threads, and watching YouTube videos, I got a workable combination.

More wasted time. Ship the camera with face-detect defaults that detect and track faces. I’m sure lots of people are happy to customize the autofocus parameters. Most of us want it to work in a basic way without spending hours on that.

Even after all that, I have dozens of ‘face detected’ photos where the camera just focused on something else or the background, the same frustrating behavior I am used to with my other Fuji cameras.

It really is better than it used to be. For photography, most people will never notice, and it will be absolutely fine. For someone who bought the camera for its improved face-detect abilities, it fails too many tests. The dozens of forum posts where people tell you to increase tracking to 2 and reduce sensitivity to 1, and then it works (I just made this up; people say all kinds of things), is not a real solution.

The Final Straw

The breaking point for me happened when I was standing on a street corner in Hiroshima waiting for the right collection of people to enter my scene for the photograph. I stood there for almost 30 minutes, and then it finally happened. I lifted my camera to my face, and… it had gone into sleep mode. Sometimes when you hit the shutter button, it wakes up right away, but usually you have to spam the button for 3 seconds, and then the camera finally wakes up.

When it wakes up, all your settings are lost, and it reverts to the profile defaults.

Why the hell does the camera have a sleep mode if it doesn’t preserve my session settings? If I want to save battery, I’ll just turn the camera off then, it’s effectively the same and boots faster. My friend’s Lumix G85 from 10 years ago can resume from sleep correctly.

My exposure and AF settings were all wrong. I missed the shot. That was the end for me.

Build Issues

Finally, the EVF coating on the viewfinder looked to be coming off and flaking away.

$2,000 camera.

My Repair Experience

I also sent this camera in for repair. Some bird poop got into one of the seals, damaging the foam. Fujifilm US received the camera and told me they would either quote me or fix it. Then, 3 weeks went by. I heard nothing from them. They shipped my camera back without repair. They also wiped all my settings with a firmware update that I didn’t ask for.

The camera returned with a, “QC” sticker on the bag. Quality Control—what?

This is another inexcusable experience with the brand and camera.

I Sold It

Ultimately, these problems left me in a state where I didn’t want to use the camera. And that is the death nail to any piece of physical equipment. If you don’t want to pick it up and use it, you might as well not own it.

So, I sold it. And I won’t be looking back.

In my view, Fujifilm is interested in selling Instax lifestyle cameras, making medical equipment, and making money. And, from a business perspective, I can’t fault them for any of those things. It’s perfectly logical.

Honestly, the cameras are mostly fine. Not as nice as they were. But I’ve lost faith in the brand and direction. EVF coatings are coming off, lugs are dropping out of the cameras, paint is chipping off, and poor service experiences seem commonplace. I may not be totally done with them, but I see Fujifilm as fun gear now, not serious photography equipment. No more new purchases from Fuji.

I’m not a Fujifilm investor, I’m a photographer. And they seem to have lost their focus on being real players and contributors to the art form of photography. So, for now, I will be taking my business elsewhere.

This is not my best image. It is not my most beautiful image. It is not even a particularly interesting image. Though, I suppose all of that is relative in a sense.

However, what it represents is a fundamental shift in my understanding of photography. It is the first image in what was to become, ‘my style.’ Not that this is particularly important. In fact, I would encourage anyone interested in photography not to worry too much about style. It will happen all on its own.

But, up until this rainy May morning on the California coast, I had felt I was searching for something in my photography. I wasn’t sure what it was, how to define it, or even how to ask myself questions about it. I knew I wanted to make a certain kind of image, but I really couldn’t define it much more than that. For some reason, though, the task was compelling enough for me to keep at it… for years. When this image was taken, I was about three years into a more focused effort to improve my photographic skills. And by focus, I guess I really mean just time and effort. I really had no idea what I was doing or why.

Looking back now, I can see that this was less about improving my photography and more about my need for an outlet, for creativity, for an escape from my difficulties at work and with relationships. It was about being outside an office, about taking the world in.

And in many ways, that hasn’t really changed. In fact, as I’m saying this, I am now realizing how little the actual photographs mattered.

In truth, I think learning photography was the anecdote I needed for the general turbulence in my life. It was a way for me to cope with the parts of my life and myself that weren’t working.

As the years have gone on, the skill-building aspect has become less important. I’m happy with my photos. Sure, they are always improving, and I want to continue that journey. However, it’s barely about that now.

Every week I spend dozens of hours behind a computer screen. Photography has largely become a way for me to re-engage with the physical world outside without having to make an plans or negociate schedules with any other people. It’s just me and my camera, wandering around and looking at things.

It has become a meditative practice.

I’m reminded of an evening I spent with my camera on the side of a mountain in Kings Canyon National Park. A quiet drive up a mostly abandoned road with only maybe an hour of daylight left. Every tree, every fern, every leaf was taking on that incredible yellow gold from the low angle of the sun.

The place was absolutely still, not even the suggestion of a breeze. I passed a Mule deer on the way up. I stopped my truck right in front of it, and we just sat there and looked at each other for a while; I have no idea how long. Eventually, I parked my vehicle. For an hour, I wandered around the hillside, taking photos of bark, leaves, moss, pine trees, and a lake. And none of them were any good. Not a single one.

But it didn’t matter at all. The results were completely irrelevant. I was in a different world, a different place.

And so, while the first photo in this post represents the beginning of what characterizes my photography now, its true value is a journey that has not been about photography at all.

So, in a way, I’m not sure you need to care about how good your photographs are. I think the process of making them is enough.

Something insidious has been happening over the last few decades. Not in secret, so much, but slow enough to go unnoticed: The Internet has turned into a steaming pile of garbage.

Enshittification is rampant on every platform, degrading the experience of almost every web-app, site, and service.

Twitter has turned into X, and in my view, a platform that was somewhat hostile and crawling with bad behavior is now an utterly toxic (and useless) pile of horse turds.

Additionally, when I signed up for Instagram 15 years ago, it was a place to share photos with real people. It was creative and social. And, dare I say, fun. Now, it is a digital succubus that endeavors not to help me socialize and see the creativity of others, but to capture as much of my attention as humanly possible (so it can serve me ads—while simultaneously rotting my brain and, quite literally, making me dumber). Or stupider. Or more dumb. However you say it. See? It worked.

For the most part, I left social media quite a few years ago. The accounts are still there, but I try to avoid them at all costs.

I wish that was the worst of it. I wish I could say that just leaving social media was sufficient to avoid being constantly harassed or annoyed on the Internet. But, doing almost anything online now goes something like this:

I visit a site because I need to accomplish something. I am halted first by an utterly confusing message about my cookies and my privacy. And, I am left reading through legalese that I don’t understand, to make a selection I don’t care about, regarding a use of data that is utterly opaque to me. This is all presented in a completely non-standard way, and I’m mad about it because this doesn’t seem worth my time to actually parse. So, I just click one of the options… because I was trying to do something.

Then I finally get around to doing the thing I came there to do, making 30 seconds of progress before I am once again blocked. A notification appears to tell me that I need an account. I sign up for the account.

Wait, did I already do this? Did I use my email before? Facebook or Google authentication? Now I have to sign into my password manager to check. I waste 3 minutes figuring that out.

I try to log in.

The account requires 2-factor authentication. Ugh, ok. I deal with that.

I log in. Again.

Pop-up “Sign up for our newsletter?”

F**k this.

And I leave.

I don’t even have to get into AI slop and the destructive move from followers to algorithms. I think you get the point.

I Probably Sound Like an Old Man

I’m in my 40s. So, if you are younger than me, you might not know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the Internet was not completely commoditized, industrialized, and capitalized.

It was a place where actual people, individuals, went to share things. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t completely safe. And it was far from ideal. But it was real, it was authentic, and it was fun.

Actually, it still is. You just have to work at it a little more now.

The “World Wide Web” Was Awesome

Last week, in a moment of extreme irony, YouTube’s algorithm served me this video about the Indie Web. I knew within a minute or two that I had found something special, something I wanted to be a part of. Even a small part.

The Internet used to be more commonly referred to as the “World Wide Web”. It was, at its basic level, an interconnected set of digital locations. What made it usable wasn’t a venture-funded app or a platform where you could become a “partner”. The “web” or connection part came from links.

If you liked something or something was relevant or interesting, you linked to it. And other people linked to things. The whole digital world was a web—of links.

No one was recommending anything to you. No singular powerful entity was steering you toward something or away from something. You were an explorer. You found one door into the web through your favorite blog, page, or forum, and you explored from there. Clicking links.

You might have ended up somewhere completely irrelevant. You might have gotten bored because none of them were interesting. But most of the time, you found something cool, maybe by someone compelling in a corner of the world that you would never have otherwise seen.

It was decentralized. It was creative. And a lot of it was made by people. Not companies and robots. And, it was pretty cool.

And, it’s not gone.

The Indie Web

For the last week, I have been spending my evenings “browsing the Internet”. Not scrolling through TikTok (actually, I have never done that). Not deleting hostile YouTube comments or feeling bad about my life because I’m not married to a beautiful Instagram model.

I am surfing the web. Reading about how an engineer from Iceland made a image to ASCII art rendering program. I’m looking at a unique web design from a college student in Japan—somewhere. I’m learning what it’s like to lose power during a cold winter in Lithuania. I’m going through a series of posts from someone who is dealing with chronic illness. I have no idea what I am going to find or read next.

It’s relaxing. It’s inspiring. It’s interesting. It’s creative. And, I love it.

You can surf the Indie Web too! I will help you get started, right now.

First, go get a cup of tea or a glass of wine or some… lemon-water or whatever.

Neocities - Start here. Kinda the hub of this revival movement. Mostly HTML pages.

Here are a few random web-rings I found with lots of links. I haven’t been to most of them, but it’s a good place to start.

Melon Land Surf Club

Hotline Webring

There are thousdans of lists like this. I just happen to stumble upon these. Explore, and I’m sure you will find more.

Doing My Part

Inspired by these experiences, I am changing this blog to be more unique. To be my own voice again, instead of just articles that will get search traffic. I am slowly re-designing it to be fun and less sterile. And, I will, over time, add more and more links to things and people that I think are interesting. I have never had analytics and pop-ups on this site because I hate that crap, so no need to fix that. But I can do more. So, I will.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to opt out of the enshittified Internet. If the platform sucks, the people are annoying, and the experience makes you feel less human, just leave. It’s the strongest voice you have. Take your attention elsewhere. There are hundreds of thousands of wonderful tiny places for you to enjoy on the web.

Go find them.