The X100VI is probably one of the most sought-after cameras in 2025; thanks to Fujifilm’s unique approach to supply and demand, it is back-ordered into oblivion. I, however, managed to get my hands on one last year when it popped up in stock at my local Argos. A few months later, thinking I could get by without it, I sold it on eBay for pretty much exactly what I paid for it new.

Alas, like paradise, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone—and I soon found myself going back onto eBay and re-purchasing it (the same colour, similar shutter count, etc.). So why did I find myself craving this camera? What purpose did it serve when I already owned cameras with far more impressive specs?

Many photographers talk about the concept of an EDC camera—an everyday carry camera. This is the camera you can pop into your bag or your coat pocket, if it’s big enough (or the camera is small enough), and take out at a moment’s notice to capture those occasions that might unexpectedly warrant taking a photo. The EDC camera is a mythical beast that many photographers have gone mad trying to capture: the smaller a camera becomes, the more compromises need to be made; the more features you try to squeeze into a camera, the larger it becomes, and soon it’s too unwieldy to be considered something you can easily take around with you.

This is where I have found the X100VI an awesome little photographic companion: small enough to easily take around with me (though you’d be hard-pressed to fit it into a pocket), whilst also being packed full of features. It sports a 40MP APS-C X-Trans 5 sensor, has IBIS, a built-in ND filter, as well as a fixed 23mm f/2 lens that is impressively sharp throughout its aperture range. This equates to a 35mm full-frame equivalent lens—which is also one of the most versatile and useful focal lengths that you’d want to take around with you every day. As it’s a Fujifilm camera, the images that come straight out of the camera are gorgeous, though the RAW files also have enough latitude that you can put them in Lightroom and really eke out some impressive results.

All this sounds too good to be true, so what’s the catch? Well, firstly there’s the price: at roughly £1,500 (give or take), for a fixed-lens APS-C camera, it is very much a luxury item. The first wedding I photographed used an interchangeable-lens camera that cost half as much and produced stellar results (it was the Lumix G9, by the way). So paying this much for a camera that is, by design, limited is a tough pill to swallow.

Furthermore, the camera itself can be sluggish at times. The AF isn’t lightning quick, and the lens can sometimes hunt when trying to lock onto your subject—though I admit this is not as bad as others would have you believe. Likewise, traversing the Fujifilm menu system can be, in itself, a slow process. I regularly use Nikon, whose menus often get slammed by the YouTuberati—but in comparison to the Fujifilm menus, Nikon’s menus are slick, fast and intuitive. Still, once you have set up your camera, going into the menus is only an occasional chore—so again, this is a problem I can live with.

One of the problems I have faced, which actually outweighs the others by a fair margin, is what I have named ‘recipe indecision’. One of the selling points of the Fujifilm system is how good the JPEGs are that come straight out of the camera. As such, it can be a quest to find the ‘recipe’ that matches your artistic vision and likewise suits your subject. In pursuit of this elusive recipe, you can often find yourself switching between ones you have found on one of the many websites that catalogue the various fan-made custom recipes, constantly experiencing ‘buyer’s remorse’ that perhaps “Classic Cuban” wasn’t the right choice, and maybe you should use “November Rain” instead (I made up one of those). When shooting RAW, of course, it’s a non-issue; you can easily edit your photographs later in Lightroom and produce any result you want. It’s simply that niggling annoyance that countless people on Reddit and Instagram seem to be producing stellar images out of their cameras with absolutely no editing involved whatsoever.

I have since come to suspect, however, that most of these images are taken most of the way with their out-of-camera JPEGs, and are then perfected using a few tweaks of a slider or two in Lightroom or on an iPhone. This is actually quite a relief, and I have no problem with this—it’s still a thousand times faster than it used to be when I was editing the RAW files that came out of my Sony A7 IV.

So, it makes a respectable EDC camera. But my life is dull enough that, unless I want to capture the mundane nature of my job, I don’t need to carry a camera every hour of every day (I wish that weren’t the case, but it is). What I do have that regularly inspires me to grab my camera is a family. Whether we’re just at the local brewery, visiting a National Trust property down the road, or having a weekend away in London—if my kids are with me, I’ll want to take photos.

Sure, I have used both my Z5II and Z8 to do this—sometimes I just want to carry around a big camera, and that’s OK. But more often than not, I am very aware that it’s not OK to make every outing about photography—sometimes it’s about the experience, and being more in the moment. (Insert image of Sean Penn in Walter Mitty here!) This is where the X100VI has been awesome: my kids don’t really feel intimidated by it, the places we visit know that it’s just a dad snapping photos of his kids, and it’s also light enough that when it inevitably swings forward on its strap and smashes my daughter in the face, she doesn’t come away looking like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

This is why I had to buy the camera again: it is a reminder that I first picked up a camera because the people in front of me warranted it. They deserved to have their photo taken. It might be the case that, in all the years since, I have become somewhat more obsessed by the process of photography and sometimes even motivated by a lust for the gear itself, but the X100VI is a reminder that photography is also about enjoying the moments with the people you’re photographing, not apart from them.

So, is the X100VI the perfect dad cam? Who cares? I am too busy having fun to notice.