The Pixii Camera

Processing Play Raw
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What do we have here? A friend from the camera club recently acquired a Pixii camera, which he yesterday loaned to me.

We went out for our weekly photo walk through Regensburg at night. There’s a light-show festival going on at the moment.

It’s a lovely piece of engineering. Sleek lines, a reassuring heft. Not the most comfortable thing to hold, but clearly designed with intention and an eye for good design.

There’s a shutter button, a manual aperture ring and focus ring on the lens, an unmarked shutter speed dial, a menu button, and a selection wheel. That’s it. If you set it to auto ISO, that’s just barely enough.

Hold the menu button to turn it on, focus, shoot. That’s all there is to it. A faint (fake) shutter sound confirms that you took a shot. It takes a bit too long for comfort to turn on, but shooting times are snappy and the camera is responsive.

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Of course the rangefinder focusing took a few minutes to get used to. Of course I shot a few dark frames with the lens cap still on. But after the initial adjustment, it went well.

It is a quirky camera indeed. That menu would really benefit from one or two more buttons. The frame lines were way too bright at night, so much so that I couldn’t really see what I was focusing at.

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But amazingly, many of the shots turned out quite well. There is a beautiful simplicity to this style of shooting that is unlike anything else.

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And I was surprised at the file quality as well. Many of these shots were little more than blackness when I opened them in darktable, and had to be pushed several stops. They did however contain a good amount of usable data, and noise levels were very acceptable for an APS-C sensor.

Actually, this is a fun little camera. For some reason, I’m enjoying it more than the Leica M240 I had tried last year.

Feel free to play_raw this thread under the terms of the CC-NC-BY-SA license. (If you do, you will notice that the white balance went absolutely wild with these images. A daylight-adjacent rendering, such as above, is realistic).

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“Pixii is designed with the future in mind” - from the Pixii web site.

I would like to have one, but it costs $3000 USD.

PS - Also, you apparently have to buy an extra rangefinder screen to match the diopter adjustment for your aiming eye.

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Pixii Max (the full frame one)? Would love to test one out.

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I think it is either the Pixii+ or the Pixii
EXIF says “Pixii Camera (A2572)”

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I have always missed rangefinder cameras, and even though the Pixii are the cheapest of the digital ones, I am not going to spend that much.

However, do you think the experience is very different from a decent MILC camera with a very good EVF (high resolution OLED etc) + a manual lens?

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FWIW, here’s Chris Niccolls’ take on the Max.

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@bastibe Thanks for sharing! Great to have the opportunity to test hardware without succumbing to GAS (just yet :stuck_out_tongue:).

Moved this to Play Raw for more exposure. Added hardware and capture to capture your hardware and light show experience.

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My version…

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Lovely city

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Last weekend, we went to Munich to the Deutsches Museum. Most of my shots with the Pixii were family shots, which I don’t share publicly. But as last time, feel free to play_raw these shots under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-NC license.

Overall, the photography on the trip went well. In contrast to last time, this time I went out in daylight, and the viewfinder was actually usable. Rangefinder focusing was much easier in good light, of course. But I still missed focus on a few shots where I wasn’t fast enough. A bit later, I closed my aperture to f/5.6, which made focusing that much easier.

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P0001362.DNG (38.3 MB) P0001354.DNG (38.2 MB)

Even indoors, f/5.6 seemed plenty bright enough. However, the light meter and white balance are just wild on this thing. Two shots were randomly overexposed for no reason, and I had learned from last time that white balance was not to be trusted. But even the static daylight balance was weirdly green. Not a problem to fix in post, of course, but strangely deficient in a modern camera. Perhaps more disturbingly, a few files were corrupted on the computer, and couldn’t be opened. It may be that I’d just need to re-download them, but again, weird for a modern product.

The Pixii does not have a screen, but strangely enough, I didn’t miss it. I’m not one to chimp after shooting, so not being able to do so didn’t bother me. I guess I would have preferred to have the option to shoot from a back screen, in particular to get low perspectives, but that balanced out with being able to see outside of the frame in the viewfinder.

Battery life is usually brought up against the Pixii, but I had 75% left after a day’s casual shooting of 50-or-so frames. That’s plenty for me. I habitually turn off my camera between shots, though, so perhaps my experience would not apply to others. Getting pictures off the camera is a bit annoying, though, as you first have to navigate its menu to set it to USB-mode (which half the time doesn’t work), and only then will it -slowly- transfer images.

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Overall, I still think this camera is great fun! It forces you to slow down, and shoot in a more conscious way. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the right style of shooting for me, but it’s certainly engaging and interesting.

If only it was a little bit less buggy, and in particular, turned on a bit quicker. That’s really its achilles heel in my opinion. I did miss a few too many shots because it just didn’t switch on in time.

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darktable with a very simple workflow

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I had a fairly hard time with the color balance in both of these shots, and I dealt with it in two different ways. All of my “standard” workflow operations kept giving the stone a strong, blue cast.

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I wasn’t there, so I don’t know the actual colors, but I like your rendition.

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In such a situation, I try to look for an objective anchor. Clouds for example are dependable neutral grey (on a partly cloudy day as in the picture).

But yeah, the Pixii’s white balance does not deserve the name.

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I’ll return the Pixii soon, so this will be my last update on it. On the whole, I enjoyed shooting with it a she lot more than I had anticipated. This is an incredibly unique and fun camera, and quite unlike anything else!

Even the Leica M is much more intimidating and complex, whereas the Pixii has a playful simplicity that I enjoy a lot.

So, here’s a last set of play_raws for you:

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P0001402.DNG (38.5 MB) P0001410.DNG (38.3 MB)

And a written review of the Pixii camera on my blog here:

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