The Battle Of The Compact 28mm APS-C Street Cameras

In the past couple of years both Nikon and now Fuji have entered the compact APS-C street camera niche taking on the vaunted Ricoh GR/GRII. What distinguishes these cameras is they are pocketable.

All three lack an electronic viewfinder but all three offer an optical viewfinder option - that best of the bunch is the Nikon 28mm field of view OVF. The problem being OVFs are generally expensive, and many shooters prefer an eye level viewfinder rather than a rear LCD.

Nikon Coolpix A

Nikon Coolpix A

Nikon entered this very niche market with a 1000$ camera that came out of the blue - as with all things Nikon the Coolpix A (was) well engineered, well built, and (had) a great sensor apparently the same one used in their DSLR D7000. Notice the past tense - Nikon stopped making the Coolpix A in 2014 and then reduced the price to well under 500$ US dollars. It was then the Nikon Coolpix A took off and generally remains well regarded as a very good street camera. Unfortunately Nikon never addressed via firmware any of the quirks of the Coolpix and it remains a strange orphan in the Nikon catalog. Combined with being an albeit well built but expensive 28mm F2.8 fixed lens camera it was a tough sell for camera dealers. It was an uphill fight for the Coolpix A with the main competition Ricoh GR having a 699$ street price and coming with a well established reputation in the street photography community.

Ricoh GR/GRII

Ricoh GR APS-C

The Ricoh GR (GRD) has a very long pedigree in both film and digital. It is a favourite among many famous street shooters. The most famous being Japanese street photographer Diado Moriyama who is a small camera master.

Ricoh has always packed a lot of features on top of a great 28mm lens. The earlier Ricoh GRD (D for digital) I/II/III/IV had small sensors and as result produced some very distinct results and were not to good in low light situations.  Ricoh tried to work around this by providing F1.9 apertures, but none the less the image sensors were a weakness for the GRD. Moving forward Ricoh moved to an APS-C sensor, dropped the D in GRD and called it the GR with a suburb 28mm F2.8 lens without affecting the size to much and keeping features such as SNAP focus mode, which is unique to Ricoh in every way. The Ricoh GR is a will built camera but not up to the Coolpix A build quality. The Ricoh is no doubt in a class of it's own when it comes to usability and hepatics. 

Recently Ricoh introduced and is selling the Ricoh GRII and as near as anyone can tell the MKII version simply added WiFi, and slightly better build quality then the already brilliant Ricoh GR. One would be hard pressed to add much to the current iteration of the GRII as it does so many things very well.

Fuji X70

Fuji X70 - Classic Chrome

So when Fuji announced the X70 which looks very much like a competitor to the GRII I was a bit surprised. 

The same day Fuji announced the X70 they also announced their flagship X-PRO-2 which tended to suck up all the oxygen, but that said the X70 caught my attention. Why? Well it ticks a lot boxes for me that the Ricoh GRII doesn't;

Flip-up screen,
Fuji X70 is operationally faster, 

A very fast hybrid (CDAF/PDAF) AF system,

Conventional F Stop/Shutter Speed controls,
Manual Focus DOF scale that stays where you set it when you turn the camera off,

Fuji X-Trans II sensor,
Excellent OOC colour, and the list will likely go on once I get into it.

I am about to find out if I made a good decision and will keep you posted.

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