I own the Pixii V2. I don't really have a library of images to share here yet, because I've just been using it casually for family stuff, but I can give my impressions about the issues others have raised here, and explain a little bit about why I'm happy with my purchase.
1. Reliability of focusing fast lenses: I came from shooting an Epson R-D1 regularly, and while I don't know off the top of my head if the base length is better or worse than the Epson, I can say that the difficulty of nailing focus on these cameras strikes me as about equal--which is to say it's not a piece of cake, but it's also not remarkably hard. It's slightly harder than it was on the M9 I shot for a while, but not enough to matter, and perhaps made up for by the fact that the Pixii rangefinder was super-accurate out of the box, and is very easy to user-adjust.
If people are indeed frustrated by this, I would suspect it's due to a combination of having a fairly high-resolution sensor and no back screen/no live view. That simply increases the likelihood of a few duds, and I think many rangefinder aficionados have probably gotten used to using live view to avoid those duds in tricky focus situations. When these backup methods are taken away from them, it's easier to blame the equipment than themselves. I've never shot an M-D 262 or M10-D, but I would wager that someone who has gotten good results from those cameras would be significantly less likely to find the focus experience on the Pixii frustrating.
2. Battery life isn't great. If you remember what it was like to shoot on the first-gen A7X Sony bodies, I'd say you get about 150% of that here--even though you don't have a screen or an EVF. Doesn't bother me, but it's certainly a disadvantage compared to other options on the used market.
3. Haven't experienced software problems myself, but I also don't use the smartphone app, so I'm not pushing the camera's firmware to perform its most complicated tasks.
4. Don't buy it if you need diopter flexibility.
5. 24 or 25mm lenses match the entire OVF nicely, so the camera can/does work reasonably well as a 35mm-equivalent, assuming that the type of subjects you're shooting isn't very demanding from a parallax-compensation perspective.
I'm a 40mm guy, I hate looking at screens in general--including on cameras--and I like to support businesses that don't make me ambivalent about their use of my money. I also love OVF cameras (I'm indifferent about rangefinders as a focusing mechanism/experience. They're fun but they're also terribly slow and generally inaccurate), but DSLRs are generally too big and obtrusive for my use, so Fuji and rangefinders are where I end up. I prefer autofocus, but the list of wide-aperture Fuji lenses that are genuinely small enough to match the X-Pro or X-T cameras is pretty short, so I always keep one Fuji body and one rangefinder.
So I'm just glad I can get a half-decent rangefinder that shoots well at 40mm-equivalent, brand new, from a small business, at a price that--while not competitive with companies that benefit from much larger economies of scale--is not astronomically or insultingly uncompetitive.
Oct 14, 2022 at 02:41 AM
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