Fuji XT-3 Will It Live Up to the Hype?

I was surprised to find out that the X-T3 and X-T30 can both focus in light down to -3ev. That’s about a 2.5ev difference from other Fuji cameras. That could be a reason for some to upgrade.... including myself.
 
Found a used XT3 at B&H and in a moment of weakness (not unexpected) pulled the trigger. I have to say it's a very impressive camera. Feels well built, solid, great in hand, focus is head and shoulders above my XT1 and XP1, very good EVF, great file quality . Very snappy altogether. No regrets, it's a keeper.
 
I've had the XT-3 for a week now and it exceeded my expectations: the build quality of the body and 23/2 lens is great, I love that it has a magnesium body and weather sealing, all controls are surprisingly intuitive, the EVF has a high resolution, the autofocus is lightning fast, and the image quality is fantastic, as expected for this new sensor. When you turn all the annoying beeping noise of the autofocus and shutter off, its is very quiet and discrete. Another feature that I love is that you can turn on the camera with the right hand and by the time you lift the camera to your eye, its ready to shoot. <1-sec boot up time, not bad! Perfect for street photography or anything else that needs fast reaction time. It might sound silly, but this was my main argument why I didn't buy the Canon EOS R or EOS RP (aside from the monster-sized lenses), which have the on/off button on the other side of the camera and you need two hands to turn it on. I am also a huge fan of the USB-C connector. For someone like me who only has Apple products, it means that I can charge the battery inside the camera with the power supply of my MacBook and MacBook Pros. And contrary to what I've read, in-camera charging is just as fast as using the external battery charger, no difference. BTW, the camera is being criticized for having a low battery life of around 350 photos. I can run around all day to make photos and still have plenty of electrons left by the end of the day, so no issue for me.

Overall, this is a great camera that beats most DSLR, in a form factor the size of a Leica M body!

The only thing I'm still struggling with is manual focus. Sometimes the AF doesn't lock on what I want to be in focus, and I'd like to correct the focus by turning the focus ring on the wheel. But apparently, the manual focus ring on the lens is only active if I set the camera to manual focus. Weird, but maybe this is user error. Also, I don't like that the lens has no infinity stop. But hey, its all electronic anyway, you can even chose in the menu if you want to turn the focus ring clockwise or anti clockwise to infinity! ;)

Also, I would have expected that if I plug the USB-C cable into my laptop, the SD cards would show as external storage drives and I can drag & drop the photos to the computer. But apparently, this is not so and I have to use software to see the photos on the camera from my computer.

Also, WIFI sync with my iPhone and laptop is painfully slow. It takes over around two minutes to have the camera connected and the transfer rate of the photos is slow. Bummer and useless in real life.

I think I made a mistake that I bought two expensive 64GB SD USH-II cards with a 300 MB/s transfer rate. This is way overkill, both in terms of speed and capacity (over 4,000 photos on each card!). I used one SD card for JPGs and the other for RAW, but didn't see a difference in quality. So from now on I'm just shooting JPG and use one card as a backup.

In the end, I'm stunned that Fuji could squeeze such an outstanding camera in such a small body and still keep it with a reasonable price range.
 
The X-T3 is a generation after the X-H1. Newer sensor and faster low light autofocus. That said, the X-H1 is a great deal these days but is also bigger. You cannot go wrong really. Image stabilization is the true differentiating spec between them.
 
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