Spiffy New Cameras: Fujifilm X half and Ricoh GR IV

Late last night I noticed news of the Fujifilm X half announcement in my RSS feeds and immediately went to YouTube to see if any review/first impression videos had dropped, and they had. My first watch was from PetaPixel's channel:

What an adorably smol camera, with fun features! I had seen rumors about it, so I knew it was meant to be like a half-frame film camera that defaulted to portrait-oriented photos similar to half-frame film cameras (hence the name X half), but I didn't know much more than that. It was very cool to see all the film simulations, filters, and effects, and the ability to do diptychs, either in-camera, or after the fact in the companion phone app. Kind of a bummer it doesn't shoot RAW files, so you can have your filtered JPEGs and a regular RAW copy, but it's meant to be a simple, fun point-and-shoot, so I get why there is no RAW shooting, or other "pro" features.

I watched a few other videos:

(P.S. I wish there were channels with non-male photographers posting first-look videos like this... None showed up in my initial search or recommendation feed. Come on camera companies, branch out!)

From Gordon Laing's video, I saw you can also do a diptych for videos shot with the X half, which could be really cool to play around with.

Out of the blue, after I watched a couple videos last night about the X half, my recommendations feed surprised me with a new video about the Ricoh GR IV announcement that happened yesterday, also. This wasn't really on my radar, so it was a pleasant surprise.

The Ricoh GR IV isn't as quirky of a camera as the Fuji X half, but I still am quite interested in it because I like pocketable point-and-shoots, and had a Ricoh GX100 a long time ago (whereabouts currently unknown, annoyingly) that I loved shooting with. It was an older camera than the GR-series with a smaller CCD sensor vs the APS-C sensors in the more modern GR-series, but its form factor was very similar and was still awesome to use.

Besides wanting both of these cameras for my collection (of course), I am really happy to see camera and electronics manufacturers out there who still make niche, and/or quirky, eccentric products. I will also include the recently announced Fuji GFX100RF and the Sigma BF with this lot. It reminds me of "Old Sony", who made products because they wanted to flex their creative engineering prowess, not make a race-t0-the-bottom, throwaway product for short-term profit. (Sony's on my mind since I started reading my hardback copy of Sony: The Private Life by John Nathan recently.)

Mini-Rant

A lot of tech now is top-of-the-line specwise, but boring as all get out. I've always been partial to quirky tech – rocking something like a Surface Duo 2, or a BlackBerry KeyOne as my daily driver phones in the past – even though now I've compromised on some things, like buying an iPhone 16 Pro Max for my daily driver (the product name... 🤦‍♀️) instead of one of the latest foldable phones, for various reasons. But I will always cheer on the companies doing something different and releasing competent, intriguing products (sorry, Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1, you don't qualify). Perhaps naively, I will continue hoping that other companies will snap out of these snoozefest product development loops dictated by bean counters that only have minor spec bumps and design iterations, and create awesome, intriguing, strikingly beautiful products that people genuinely love to use, instead of begrudgingly use.