Category: Photography

A while back I reviewed the Viltrox EF-FX1 adapter, my first attempt at bridging my old Canon EF and EF-S lenses over to my Fujifilm X-S10. The abridged version of that experience: it was frustrating. Firmware roulette, random errors, camera freezes requiring battery pulls, and auto focus performance that varied wildly between versions. I kept it because it was just good enough, but it never stopped feeling like a workaround rather than a solution. Moreover, Viltrox never released any further firmware versions, so the 2.29 blob tested in that post really is the last firmware.

Fast forward to recently, and I decided to give the whole thing another shot. This time with the 7Artisans EF-FX adapter. Same concept: an electronic adapter with auto focus support, aperture control, and EXIF data transmission, and at 119€ it sits right in the same price bracket as the Viltrox. But is it actually better? Spoiler: yes. Let me walk you through it.

Yesterday I created an account in pixelfed.social, one of the many instances of Pixelfed, the distributed image sharing open source project which federates with Mastodon and others. Anyone can set up its own instance and have it ’talk’ to all the others. So, I created an account and started sharing some of my shots. For the most part, it works very well and I’m eternally grateful that something like this exists, free from the claws of big corporations hungry for your data.

A few days ago I got my new camera, a brand new Fujifilm X-S10. Since I’m coming from the Canon ecosystem I have a few EF and EF-S lenses which I like. In order to use them with my new system I also acquired the auto focus lens mount adapter Viltrox EF-FX1, which allows EF/EF-S Canon lenses to be used with Fuji-X mount mirrorless cameras. This is an adapter with electronics, so it enables not only auto focus but also aperture control and EXIF data transmission. But does it really work? Is it useful? And more importantly, is it worth the asking price of 120€? In this post I document my experience after some tests performed over a few days.

I’ve been using the compact point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX10 as my main camera of choice for the past few years. Make no mistake, it captures very high-quality pictures taking into account its 1-inch sensor size. My old DSLR, the Canon EOS 40D, still works fairly well, but it’s starting to show its age: The trigger button is hit-or-miss—even after cleaning it thoroughly with isopropyl alcohol, the camera no longer establishes a connection to a PC via USB and downloading the images is quite cumbersome as I need a special card reader for Compact Flash memory cards. Both are ancient technology by today’s standards.

So I decided to treat myself with an early Christmas present and got a mirrorless Fujifilm X-S10 with the Fujinon XC 15-45mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS PZ lens and the Viltrox EF-FX1 adatper, which just came in the mail yesterday afternoon. In this post I’m documenting my very first impressions with the camera and the accessories.

Today I’d like to drop some photos of my recent holidays to Nepal here. All of these were taken using a Canon 40D with the Canon 28-105 USM II f3.5-4.5. I decided to leave my other two lenses home (the wide angle lens Sigma 10-20 1:4-5.6 EX DC HSM and the standard Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Mk II) because of the philosophy of the travel. We were mostly a backpacker group and we’d be moving around quite a lot, trekking the Himalayas and going to the jungle, so I figured the extra weight wasn’t worth it. Looking backwards, I regret not taking the wide angle lens, for some of the landscapes we could behold were truly amazing.