I kept my Nikon lenses because I love Nikon and I figured they would come out with something I like sooner or later. I feel the future is mirrorless but having night sweats at the possibility of being a social outcast for going ASP-C… ;-). It is especially true if I have some point of reference, say an image I took previously under different light levels.

The Fujifilm X-E2 is a digital rangefinder-style mirrorless camera announced by Fujifilm on October 18, 2013. I would certainly take good care of the camera when facing extreme humidity levels and would take precautionary steps not to cause too much condensation when shooting in the cold.Shooting in JPEG gave some slightly unusual renderings of defocused areas, but the problem was nil in RAW. Alongside the shutter speed dial is another tactile dial for changing the exposure compensation, now with an expanded range of +-3EV - together these three controls make it extremely easy to set the exposure. If you want to mimic a rangefinder system for much less, there may be no better choice for the dollar.

If I'm to make one point in this review, it is simply this: You cannot fully replace a Leica M rangefinder system with any other camera system.The X-E2 excels in crappy light and excels for photos of people, but its colors don't look as snappy in good light for photos of places and things. The camera has the same 16MP resolution as its predecessor but a new sensor, the X-Trans CMOS II sensor. The only defect in the automatic eye-control is that if bright sunlight is shining on your eye as you hold it to the finder, that the X-E2 may switch back to the rear LCD instead.

Now you can hold the AF-L button to lock focus while taking pictures, while the AE-L button will allow you to lock the exposure separately. It has quickly become a very natural size and shape – that Nikon body, though that much more secure in hand, feels almost unwieldy. Two small metal eyelets on either side of the body are used for connecting the supplied shoulder strap, which isn't quite as luxurious as the rest of the package. I found myself a bit frustrated with the X100T in use, and it didn't feel like a Leica to me at all. And the dials – save for the aperture ring on the lens, but that is a separate subject – offer very good resistance.The worst thing about the finder is that the exposure compensation scale cover the left part of the image, and never goes away (you can delete it in a Custom setting, but only on a second Custom screen option, not the Standard display). At the same time, it's actually much lighter than a first glance might suggest, weighing in at 350g body only with the battery and memory card fitted, a full 100g lighter than the X-Pro1.

I don't use this on other cameras, but the X-E2's blinking highlight option works just fine instead. So, unless it is the light that changes often and I can’t anticipate it, I will almost always naturally switch to M with my Nikon. This is great, but as you're waiting for the camera to time and "process" a dark-frame subtraction for noise reduction, there's no "processing" countdown on the finder.

And perhaps I’ve only spent about a week with the camera, but it is still something I am a little bit bothered by. The X-E2 has a subtle but effective hand-grip at the front and a space at the rear for your thumb, with your grip helped in no small part by the textured faux-leather surface that runs around the full width of the camera. Until you learn to gain this ‘correct’ exposure via the experience factor, people will flounder around complaining about why their cameras do not ‘work’ properly or how they think they should work.