Why did you buy an X series???

My last SLR was not a "D" it was an "F". I'm just an amateur photographer, so I don't have lots of money to spend on gear. I loved the photos I was able to make with my Pentax SF-10, with a Sigma 24/f2.8, Takumar 135/f2.5, and Deitz 35-70/f2.8-3.8 Macro. One time I dropped the kit lens and it quit working. I never was all that impressed with the AF on it anyway, so I just bought manual focus lenses on eBay.

But the cost of film processing got to be annoying, especially when my daughter graduated from high school. And I was always putting them onto CDs anyway, so I eventually got a Panasonic FZ-28. That was okay, and I made a number of photos with it that I liked, but I've been champing at the bit of its small sensor for some time now. There are shots that I refrain from making, or refrain from showing, because of it.

Still, I didn't want to lug around a DSLR, they just look too serious somehow. When mirrorless interchangeable cameras started coming out, but none of them really caught my fancy until the X-Pro 1. Too expensive for me though, so now I have an XE-1 on the way.

The reason the X-series has caught my imagination is mainly image quality. Certainly I've seen a lot of boring photos taken with X-series cameras, but when they're on, they pop like nothing I've ever seen, especially in the digital world.

Aside from just the image quality given by the sensor, the lenses are superb, and the "kit" zoom is much more to my liking compared to the typical f3.5-5.6 lenses most cameras are packaged with. Since it's $300 off, I'm buying that first.

Also, I find the placement and marking of the controls to my liking, and being older, I can't really deal with just having an LCD screen for focusing. I wear contacts with one for close focus and one for distance, but the close focus side still doesn't focus close enough for camera focusing. I need the EVF with diopter to be able to see what I'm doing up close. Comprende?