I have to admit, I was more than surprised when I opened the Fujifilm X100's packaging. Of course, I'd seen photos and videos right from when the camera was announced at Photokina last year, but I wasn't prepared to handle this rather small, retro looking camera. For me, a professional camera has until now, looked like a clunky black box with a bunch of buttons.

Warming up

To call the X100 old-fashioned would be unfair. It's small, but spunky. It reminded me of the metal-bodied beauties from Nikon and Minolta from the 70's.

Full credit goes to Fujifilm for attempting to create a camera that looks like a rangefinder, yet has an array of manual, professional controls. The body is a piece of art – magnesium alloy and leather fusing perfectly together to create a camera that's a stunning classic. There's been a lot of talk about the limitations of the camera – for one, it comes with a fixed 23mm lens. It also doesn't offer any scene modes, so you won't be able to use a shortcut to get a great photo. But while these may seem like negatives to some, I think these are precisely the features that force the user to think creatively.

Although it does have a digital menu, the main controls that a photographer requires are all located, physically, on the body. So there's an aperture ring on the lens, and two separate dials on the top – one to adjust shutter speed and the other for exposure. There's a small customisable function button as well, which is pre-programmed to bring up ISO. The idea of course being that you will tweak one or all of these controls to get that perfect shot.

The lens

The 23mm Fujinon lens is a 35mm equivalent. While it might seem inadequate as regards focal length, it offers an ultra wide aperture of F2 – perfect for those dreamy portrait shots where the subject is in sharp focus and the background is blurrily unrecognisable. It's also surprisingly good for macro shots – the lens can focus up to 4 cm away from a subject. Aperture goes all the way up to F16, which is good for landscape shots on really sunny days.

There's a switch on the side of the camera that lets you toggle between auto and manual focus modes. This isn't the perfect camera for quick shooting - the auto focus takes its own time. It's also teasingly annoying at times – it focuses exactly where you want it to, and when you press the shutter button it defocuses and all you get is a blurry haze. There's another problem – the camera won't focus on anything that's less than 2 feet away from it unless you use the macro mode. An annoying quirk is that if you switch to macro mode and then try to adjust exposure, it turns off. This also happens when you switch between viewing and shooting modes.

When you switch to manual focus, which I used mostly for still-life or landscapes, the easiest thing to do was frame the shot, use the AFL lock to autofocus and then adjust the focus manually.

The autofocus assist lamp is by default switched on, so it helps the camera focus when the subject is too dark. The wide aperture was also perfect for night shots, because a large aperture allows more light to enter the lens. This means you can take great, non-blurry shots without using the flash. Because you'll also have to slow down your shutter speed, you can get a nice set of night shots with the subject in focus and wonderfully hazy, streamy light trails as the background. Something you wouldn't be able to achieve with your DSLR kit lens. For a night shot you will have to amp up your ISO settings, and the camera offers a wide range of 200-12,800. We managed to get excellent low light shots up to ISO 3,200, with barely any discernable noise.

If you want to really exercise the lens, you can choose a burst mode of 3fps or 5fps. Once you focus the lens on your subject, simply depress the shutter button and the camera captures quick frames of either 10 JPEG or 8 RAW images. Speaking of image formats, there's a dedicated RAW button as part of the controls – a feature that pros will love.

The camera offers a shutter speed range from 4 to 4,000. There is a Bulb mode as well. Like I mentioned, there aren't any scene modes, but if you want to go fully auto, you can rotate the aperture and shutter dials to ‘A', which will put the camera in Program (P) mode.

These controls also let you switch between Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority modes.

The viewfinder

An amazing feature of the X100 is the fact that it has a hybrid viewfinder –a regular optical viewfinder which lets you look directly through the glass, and an electric viewfinder that shows you the actual image you're about to take, complete with the exposure and white balance settings. The only problem with using the optical viewfinder is that because it's not located directly above the lens – it's on the left corner of the camera – you have the problem of parallax. So this means that when you focus on your subject, the frame you capture will be different from what you view. While it's ok for landscape shots, it simply doesn't work for close-ups.

There's even a third option of a live view through the LCD screen. This works better for wide-angle shots.

Modern controls

Despite the retro-inspired design, the interface of the camera offers you a complete set of controls that you can tweak from the main menu. Unfortunately, the menu isn't really intuitive – for one, ISO and Auto ISO are in two completely different sections of the menu. You can make a bunch of other changes from within the menu, including metering, white balance, colour, sharpness and dynamic range. There's also a film simulation mode that gives you old Fuji options like Provia, Velvia and Astia, as well as a Monochrome (black and white) mode.

Final call

The X100 has many limitations, but that's what makes it so inspiring. It forces you to think out of the box, and the results are photos you would have never thought of taking with your point and shoot or DSLR. It also forces you to use manual controls, giving you the satisfaction of taking a great shot that you've composed every detail of. Even though Fujifilm calls it a professional camera, I think it would make a great first camera for an aspiring photographer, because it lets you start from the basics. The downside is that it's pricey - almost double that of what an entry-level DSLR would cost – a factor that could deter a lot of budding photographers.

Love: Dedicated, intuitive controls, great lens

Hate: Takes a while to focus, expensive

Rs 66,999

ketaki@thehindu.co.in

Follow Ketaki on Twitter @ketaki86

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