Fujifilm XF-1 camera review. A manufacturing fault and a worthless guarantee. Extremely bad customer service is the reason why I will never buy a Fujifilm product again

Sadly, our FujiFilm camera suffered from a very common fault which is the result of bad design. There are literally hundreds of reports online of exactly the same problem occurring with FujiFilm cameras in all countries where the XF1 was sold. After our camera went wrong, we then discovered the other very common problem experienced by FujiFilm customers: The guarantee is worthless because FujiFilm does not honour the guarantee when their cameras fail, even when they fail from a well known and common fault.

It does looks great. But don't buy a Fujifilm camera - read on

On the 28th of August 2014 I bought my wife, Judy, a gift of a new camera. A Fujifilm XF1, which had been discounted in a local supermarket from a previous price of around €300 to €149. The XF1 not only looked attractive but it had a great specification and I was pleased to find it at a reasonable price. The impressive EXR CMOS sensor allows very wide dynamic range in photos by pairing pixels, ISO settings up to 12800 are possible, the camera can take HD video with stereo sound, and it has a full range of manual controls should you want to use them. The aluminium case promised a level of robustness that you'd perhaps expect from a plastic case camera. Reviewers described the camera as being a "stunning design" and having "excellent build quality".

Unfortunately, reviews are generally written immediately after products are released and cannot be relied upon to reflect the long term quality of a product. This review is different. I'm going to tell the truth about what happened to a camera which was used quite lightly and carefully for just seven months before it first went wrong.

Initial photos taken with the camera were great. This one dates from the September 2nd 2014. This was the first day that Judy really used her new camera. Unfortunately, such good performance didn't last long. Read on...

This camera took just seven months to fail due to a known production fault. Fujifilm refuse to fix it.

Our camera displaying the "Lens Control Error" message. Many people have found that their Fujifilm XF1 cameras fail with a "Lens Control Error", it's a very well documented problem with this model of camera. But Fujifilm blame the customer for the fault.

By the start of April 2015, just seven months after purchase, the camera had begun to behave strangely. At first we blamed ourselves, thought we'd set the camera into a strange mode. So we reset it to factory settings a couple of times, but the problem slowly became more obvious. The photos below are all as they came out of the camera and are representative of the quality of photograph which you can expect from a FujiFilm XF1 camera. The only processing of these photos was to scale to a web friendly size:

April 12 2015: Images were increasingly overexposed. This was the first sign of the problem. Already these photos are unusable.

April 30th 2015: Background is completely whited out. An interesting effect with these beans, but it's not accurate.

May 10th 2015: At this point the problem appeared to be related to zoom. Zoom past "35" and the result was a washed out photo like this, while otherwise the photos could still be quite good. After taking a photo which is overexposed like this one, the camera would always report a "Lens Control Error" and you'd have to shut it down and restart in order to take another photo.

May 10th 2015: The extreme colours of this photo are as they came from the camera. Even indoors and not zoomed in, the camera would sometimes do strange things with photographs such as produce these extreme colour shifts.

May 24th 2015: In less than eight months, the camera has become completely unusable. It rarely produces a photo which has any value at all. This is the result indoors in a relatively dark room on a cloudy day.

By the end of May 2015, the camera was completely unusable. The "Lens Control Error" message would appear on power-up most of the time, and if you were lucky enough ever to be able to take a photo before the error appeared, it would shut the camera down after a single photo had been taken. The results were in any case as shown above.

Returning the camera to FujiFilm

I contacted FujiFilm through their website on the 19th of May, describing how this problem had slowly become obvious. This is what I wrote on the FujiFilm website:

I live in the Netherlands. In August I bought a Fujifilm XF1 camera as a present for my wife. The serial number is 2DQ42707. This camera has now stopped working properly, just nine months after purchase.
The fault shows itself as a "lens control error" reported on the screen on the back of the camera. Photos which have been taken with the camera are now over-exposed to the point of being completely useless.
Searching on the internet I find that this is a common fault with the XF1.
How will fujifilm rectify this fault ?

Two days later I received a reply. It appeared that FujiFilm were taking this seriously. They offered to send a service to collect the camera from us and promised return of a working camera in 8-10 days:

You will note that there was no request from FujiFilm for us to enclose any documentation with the camera. At this stage it appeared that they recognised the problem as a production fault and intended to fix it.

However, that was not to be. On the 28th of May, already seven days after promising return of a working camera withing 8-10 days, I received email from FujiFilm which directed me to this web page:

This screen grab is from after the camera was returned to us, so redirects to the shipping company rather than allowing tracking within FujiFilm's own system. The next screen-shot down shows what FujiFilm's system displayed on the 29th of May.

It now began to look like FujiFilm were looking for excuses not to repair the camera under guarantee. Note that the parcel which I sent to FujiFilm included everything which they asked me to send to them. I did not include a receipt for purchase because they did not request one. It was a simple case of FujiFilm fixing a known manufacturing defect. However, while the website said that they "can not offer a warranty repair", it did allow me to click through to find out how much a repair would cost and that led to the following screen:

Note that the total repair price is shown here as € 0.00. At that point it appeared that the non warranty repair was to cost nothing. This was a strange way of dealing with customers, but I was happy with this if it meant they would stick to their original promise of repairing the camera. I clicked on the "Doorgaan met reparatie" (go ahead with repair) button and also sent email asking for clarification.

Fujifilm's photo of battery door damage
which they blame for the Lens Error

Later on the 29th, I received a further email from FujiFilm which made it clear that the € 0.00 which their website had offered us was not the price that they wanted to charge us for repair. Their email included two attachments. One attachment was a photo claiming to show the damage which they claim caused the fault.

I was surprised by the company's insistence that we had damaged the camera because any portable device has to be designed to be robust and this particular camera, though not an "action cam" was actually being sold on the basis of its robustness due to having an aluminium body in place of plastic. In any case, Judy is extremely careful with cameras. She's far more careful than I am, always using a wrist strap, always making sure that the camera is stored in a bag while cycling. It's rare that Judy breaks anything. As such, she was quite upset about dropping her camera from her desk onto a carpeted floor during the first month of ownership, but as this supposedly "robust" camera had shaken off that fall with no sign of what had happened except for a slight deformity around the battery door we forgot about it. Of course, mobile devices do need to be designed to be robust. Such a minor fall should not result in anything other than minor cosmetic damage. This didn't affect operation of the camera at all.

As such, it was clear that this fall had no connection whatsoever with the commonly reported manufacturing fault for which we had returned the camera, but unfortunately FujiFilm were looking for excuses not to repair a fault which was of their own making. Further down this page you'll find other FujiFilm customers report that FujiFilm blamed external damage for the same fault on their XF1 cameras, even when there was no external damage before the product was sent in for repair.

They want to charge us how much ? With no guarantee ?

The other attachment in the email from Fujifilm was a bill for repair. It read as follows (English translation below):

So they're offering to replace the optics and the main printed circuit board, claiming that both were damaged by bending the battery compartment door and demanding a total of €274 for this repair. That's nearly double the original cost of the camera. Note that though the battery door damage is claimed to be important, they're not offering to repair the battery door for this price. What's more, at a total cost of nearly double the original price of the camera, the last paragraph points out that they don't even guarantee that this fix will be all that is required to restore correct operation of the camera.

On June 16th the camera was sent back to us, in exactly the same condition as we sent it to FujiFilm. They have not attempted a repair, but have enclosed a letter which says "As previously communicated several times our technicians confirmed an external damage, from which it results than the warranty is void." Fujifilm has sold us a €150 paperweight. I'm glad I didn't pay full price for this dreadful product.

In the next section I show how we are far from alone in having experienced this problem with the camera and also far from alone in finding that Fujifilm have no interest at all in backing up their guarantee:

How many other people have the same fault ? Getting wise to FujiFilm

Clearly FujiFilm had no intention of providing good customer service so I started to read wider about the problems which other people were having with these cameras. Google turns up more than 2000 results if you search for "xf1 lens control error" and amongst them I found some real gems. Hundreds of people have had exactly the same experience with the cameras as we have, and many of them have received just the same standard of "customer service" as we have:

e.g. dhill complained that:

Has anyone ever gotten Fuji to take responsibility for this "Lens Control Error" issue? I spoke with Fuji yesterday and they told me that this was not considered a "Known Issue" and that it would cost me at least $140 to have repaired (though probably much more, since the lens assembly will most likely need replacing). When I said that there were many documented cases of this defect, the Fuji tech rep laughed at me and said, "so you think because 50 people on a forum have had this issue, it's Fuji's problem?" This is what we're up against, the company keeps pretending that this isn't a mechanical defect on their part, when a quick Google search shows that tons of people are having this same issue. So until Fuji does the right thing and fixes our cameras, we're stuck with $500 paperweights.

There's a huge eleven page thread on Amazon started by YSC in which dozens of people report similar faults:

During this past summer we bought not one, but four XF1s among the friends and family [...] The lens, alas, became the fatal problem, which I'll describe in more detail later. During the summer we shot thousands of pictures, and the camera failed within 6 weeks, right outside the return period. Granted, I shoot a lot more than the average user, but there was no explanation for this. I thought maybe we did something that caused this failure, but in reality we babied the camera without ever abusing it [...] However, in time, ALL of the other three cameras developed the same problem. I purchased these in July, and the last one developed this problem at the beginning of November--the one that's probably the least used. This denotes that the problem isn't isolated, but results from a design flaw, that in my four cameras, caused a 100% failure rate [...] The service rep looked up the info and said that they found a ding on the front of the lens housing, suggesting impact damage, resulting in the lens error, and the warranty was voided. I tried to explain how the front lens housing has a very thin sheet metal, and can easily be dinged (e.g. putting it in the pocket with other things?), and how I have three others in pristine condition with the same problem, proving its irrelevance. 

This is a description of exactly the same symptoms as we had with our camera, and he has also experienced exactly the same response from FujiFilm. That's despite dealing with the US division of FujiFilm while we're in the Netherlands.

Here's another long thread started by Sean65 where multiple people have the same problem. The last post on this thread reads as follows:

Our XF1 had the exact problems as yours.  This one guy had the same problems with 4 units and he documented his experience on amazon.  I knew what I might run into with their repair facility so I did a video of our unit to show there was no "impact damage" which is how the repair facility gets out of warranty repairs apparently.  Sure enough, when I called in, they claimed just that.  I told them that I did a video that would prove that there was no such damage.  They tech told me that he'd call me back after he talked to the manager (NJ repair facility).  He called back and said they'd drop the $140 repair charge and honor the warranty.  If anyone goes this route of a repair, I'd recommend being prepared should they claim "impact damage" if there wasn't.  The aluminum on these has been designed to be worn off with ease to lend itself to this worn retro look and ours had that.  My wife kept it in her purse so you have rubs and little scratches but that's it.  This "lens control error" problem is clearly a design problem and I'm guessing the success rate of the repair facility manager is predicated on how many units they can invalidate the warranties or simply not repair under that status. It's a shame. I love their products or "loved" them.

On youtube you can find a video from someone who had the same error and who tried to take the camera apart to fix it himself. I've not tried this, but as the camera will otherwise be scrapped because FujiFilm won't repair their own product, perhaps I may try it at some point in the future. There is nothing to lose.

There's even a Facebook group specifically for talking about the FujiFilm XF1 Lens Control Error problem. A quote from that group: "My Fujifilm XF1 still has the LENS CONTROL ERROR. Fujifilm just don't want to know. I told them about the problem weeks ago, but they said I would have to pay a minimum of £85 to have them take a look at it. I told them it was a well known fault they knew about the camera and they should cover the cost."

A Dutch review website also has many reports of this same problem with the camera and the same problem with FujiFilm refusing the honour the guarantee.

Don't buy FujiFilm

Some of the reports of the Lens Control Error problem actually date from before I bought our camera. I had even read a couple of them before buying, but I made the assumption that these were isolated problems and that FujiFilm was an honorable company which would put right any faults under guarantee. I was wrong to make that assumption.

This advertisement for a new FujiFilm XF1 states that the
camera has a "two year factory guarantee". Good luck with
that ! It'll go wrong just like all the others and FujiFilm will
refuse to fix it.

This is probably the poorest customer service I've ever experienced. I will never buy a FujiFilm product again, and I suggest that you don't either. How can I trust any product from a company which doesn't back up their guarantee even when it is clear that the failure was due to a manufacturing defect which affects hundreds of customers ?

You can still buy these cameras new. The lowest prices now are under €80, which would of course be a ridiculous bargain if the build quality of the camera was anythere near what it supposed to be. No other manufacturer's cameras of similar claimed performance are discounted to anything like this extent. There's a good reason why this is the case.

If you're offered a FujiFilm camera, even at a sharply discounted price, RUN AWAY.

Youtube videos from other FujiFilm customers

Other people have made youtube videos showing their reaction after FujiFilm have refused to honour the guarantee for these cameras. Here are some examples:







The serial number of our camera is 2DQ42707. As I understand it, the first digit indicates the camera was manufactured some time in 2012. They'd been for sale for quite some time before we bought ours.


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