Fujifilm X-T5 Review After 9 Months: The Perfect Daily Carry Camera?

In December 2024 I started carrying the Fujifilm X-T5 with me most days. One body, one lens: the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8. No bag full of glass, no back-up system, just a camera that felt right in the hand and produced images I wanted to look at again and again.

This isn’t a technical breakdown of specifications. You can find endless lists of megapixels and autofocus modes elsewhere. This is a real-world account of what it’s like to live with the X-T5 as your daily carry camera for months — walking through markets, hiking in the mountains, photographing friends, pets, and everyday life.

Mountains of Gudauri, Georgia before sunrise

Why the X-T5 Works as a Daily Carry

The X-T5 strikes the sweet spot between capability and portability. It’s not a pocket camera, but it’s light and compact enough that you never think twice about taking it with you. And that’s the real test of a daily camera — whether it comes along for the ride every single day.

Handling is excellent. The body feels solid, the dials make sense in practice, and the overall design encourages you to shoot. The one drawback: the grip is small, especially if you’re carrying it for hours. But it’s a trade-off you accept for the form factor.

Battery life is strong, weather resistance adds peace of mind, and nothing about the camera feels fragile or fussy.

A Classic Look with the Zeiss Touit 32mm

For this whole period, I shot only with the Zeiss Touit 32mm (about 48mm full-frame equivalent). Limiting yourself to one lens can feel restrictive, but in practice it was freeing.

This lens and sensor combination has a rendering that feels almost film-like — a classic look with natural colours and beautiful tonal transitions. It’s sharp when you need it to be, but never clinical. Whether I was shooting mountain light, a street market, or an interior, the results had a consistency that reminded me why a simple set-up often produces the best work.

Soviet stuff, Dry Bridge Market, Tbilisi

The Colours: Fuji Finally Gets It Right

Fuji’s film simulations are well known, but with earlier models I often felt the need to tweak or post-process to get the image where I wanted it. The X-T5 changes that.

For the first time, I found myself happy with many shots straight out of camera. The JPEGs look so good that I often didn’t bother opening Lightroom. When I did, using Fuji’s film profiles in Lightroom Classic gave me a perfect starting point — close to how the scene actually looked with my own eyes.

That natural rendering is a big part of what makes the X-T5 special. The files aren’t exaggerated. They’re true.

Everyday Performance

• Street & Daily Moments – Fast enough, quiet enough, and discreet in hand.

• Cityscapes & Low Light – Excellent dynamic range, smooth highlight roll-off, and natural colours at dusk and night.

• Landscapes – At 40MP, detail and tonal depth are superb, especially with snow and sky.

• Pets & Events – Autofocus is more than capable for daily photography. This isn’t a £5,000 sports body, and expecting it to perform like one is missing the point.

• Interiors & Products – Accurate colour reproduction and plenty of resolution for commercial use if needed.

Spring Blossom

A Few Things to Know

After months of use, here’s the short version:

• The handling is excellent, but the grip could be deeper.

• Image quality has a classic, film-like rendering that never gets old.

• Fuji’s in-camera film simulations are finally good enough that I often skip post-processing.

• The menus are straightforward. Autofocus is reliable. For a £1,700 camera, it delivers everything it should.

Is the Fuji X-T5 Still Worth It in 2025?

Absolutely. The X-T5 is more than just a spec sheet. It’s a camera that encourages you to shoot — to carry it, to use it, to trust it.

After nine months of daily use, it’s clear: this is the first Fuji I’ve used where the straight-out-of-camera files are so consistently good that editing feels optional. Paired with a single, versatile lens, it has all the capability most photographers will ever need.

If you’re searching for a daily carry camera in 2025 — one that balances portability, quality, and joy of use — the Fuji X-T5 should be at the top of your list.

Nikon F3 - is this the best of all worlds?

Nikin F3 with Contax Zeiss Planar (adapted to F mount)

I learned to shoot on a Minolta XGM. I still have that camera, it never fails. My Dad always had Nikons, mostly FE and FE2, I wasn’t much of a friend of the metering. When buying a camera and lenses in 1997 (I was 19) I made a foolish mistake in sticking with Minolta instead of buying a Nikon FM2N for the same price as a fully AF Dynax 505si. Maybe I just didn’t understand the Nikon magic back then. I do now.

Fast forward to today and I have an F3 and F4 and an F100 alongside my Olympus OMD-EM1 MKII and Pentax K1 and Rolleiflex 3.5E. For work I mostly use the Olympus and Pentax - but given the fact that I have to fly quite often it’s often the case that I have to prioritise what kit I want to carry. Largely that choice depends on the kind of place I’m going and what I think I’m going to need to do.

Green Bottle, Vera, Tbilisi Georgia: Kodak Ektar 100

I differentiate between work shooting and personal shooting because the requirements of these are very different. For work I need to be able to ensure absolute perfection and a fast turnaround. For my personal work I want to do as little editing as possible and for the shots to have emotion and a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. The perfection of digital photos doesn’t really touch me anymore. I get genuinely excited picking up the Rolleiflex or any of the film Nikons. For 35mm I really like the look of Kodak Ektar, whereas on Medium Format the colouration and “aesthetic” of Fuji Pro 400H really delivers due to the reproduction of greens and generally cooler hues.

Sabaduri Forest, Tbilisi National Park, Georgia: Nikon F3, Zeiss Planar 50mm 1.7, Kodak Ektar 100

Technically speaking the F100 is the best film camera I owned. It doesn’t suffer the dreaded battery drain and it was the F100 with a 50mm 1.4D that was my first fix of the Nikon magic. The F4 is a far superior camera to the F3 in technical terms, but it’s a veritable brick and I’m not sure I feel that I always need the features it provides me with. I was out shooting with the F4 this weekend on Portra 800 so I will be interested to see how things came out. Which brings us to the F3. For me the F3 represents sheer mechanical quality. Leica enthusiasts may have other opinions, but I’m talking about professional cameras - you know, the ones people used to earn a living with. The Nikon F3 may well already house a remarkable amount of electronics (it does) but the operation of the single lens reflex is fully manual or aperture priority if you wish. I personally prefer to use aperture priority in most situations and focus on composition - the F3 allows me to get on and do this whilst reliably delivering well-exposed images, the only caveat being the displays are not great to read in some light situations and the digital readouts can fail.

Gombori Pass, Kakheti, Georgia: Nikon F3, Zeiss Planar 50mm 1.7: Fuji Pro 400H

The film advance lever is wonderfully smooth, the first time I used an F3 I wondered whether I’d loaded the film properly, such was the effortlessness of the advance. The feel and sound of the shutter are quite ideal, it needn’t be any quieter - the way it’s weighted feels right. As you’ll note my copy is equipped with the HP (High Eyepoint) viewfinder which gives a 100% field of view - and is of course very bright. I’d hazard that mine feels brighter than the F4.

In terms of how the camera feels: it’s just the right weight. For using bigger lenses such as the 180mm 2.8ED the motor drive provides a better balance and grip, but I tend to put the 180 on the beefier cameras anyway. I feel that the F3 is best with a fast 50 or 35, the 24mm or 85mm, perhaps 135mm at a stretch.