Originally posted by MSM Speaking of the Debil! Playing the Devil's advocate here. When I first saw this X100, I thought what a great camera. Then I thought what would folks here say about it if it said Pentax on the camera instead of Fuji. There seems to have been so much negativity here recently along with disappointment expressed by members with Pentax releases.
I was interested at first, but when I looked into it I became quite glad it wasn't a Pentax. Because the technology seems to be a dead end.
It's not a single-lens camera. The optical viewfinder is not looking through the same lens as the sensor. It has its own lens, and some clever gubbins to try to compensate for parallax. As I understand it, the gubbins only works for a single focal length. Hence no interchangeable lenses, and no zoom.
Now people can talk about how liberating a single focal length is, and that's fine, but the crucial point is that the X100 wasn't designed that way for artistic reasons. It was designed that way because of limitations of the technology. We aren't going to see another model next year with interchangeable lenses or zooms. It's a dead end. It's not an EVIL, and it doesn't compete with DSLRs in the same way that EVIL cameras do, because it can't do the same things. It's intrinsically less flexible.
I think the EVF uses the sensor view, so that should be WYSIWYG. However, it's probably significant that they didn't have enough confidence in their EVF to dispense with the OVF. Basically, electronic viewfinders still can't hack it. If this camera is successful - and I expect it will be - then I think we might see newer models with zoom or interchangeable lenses but without the OVF. They might say it's the same, part of the same range, but the new model would be an EVIL which the X100 isn't.
So for Pentax this design would be a distraction which they can't afford. They'd be better off pursuing a proper EVIL design, or doing some other thing which would give rise to a new sustainable product range.