Fujifilm’s X-T3 captures professional-level stills and video, and it offers a stylish, weather-sealed, metal camera body that is comfortable to use for all-day shooting sessions, even if you’re trudging through a rainforest. The X-T3’s 11-frames-per-second burst shooting is more than fast enough to capture sports, and its continuous-tracking autofocus also keeps up with the action. Dual SD card slots let you organize your photos and video across two cards, or you can mirror to both cards for instant backups. The dual-hinged rear screen helps you tackle odd shooting angles, while the camera’s 4K 60 fps video capture is made even better by both headphone and microphone jacks, which allow you to use a professional-level mic and monitor it while you shoot. Plus, the Fujifilm X line of lenses has some of the best optics you can find for mirrorless cameras (even if they are a tad pricey).

One of the best things about Fujifilm cameras is the high quality of the JPEG images they capture. The X-T3 is no exception, capturing images with plenty of detail (but not oversharpened), a wide range of contrast, accurate-looking colors even at high ISOs, and relatively low noise at all but the highest ISO settings. As always, if you want to have the most control over the look of your images, you can shoot raw images and convert them using image editing software. DPReview’s image-quality comparison tool shows that at ISO 12,800 the images from the Fujifilm X-T3 are noticeably better than those from the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III but can’t quite match what the more expensive full-frame Sony ɑ7 III can capture.

Autofocus in the X-T3 relies on a 425-point hybrid phase- and contrast-detection system that is embedded in the imaging sensor and is very fast to lock focus. You can set it to continuously focus on the subject closest to the camera, to track a subject around the frame, or to detect a face in the scene and focus on that. The face detection does a good job of finding faces but has a tendency to choose the face closest to the center of the frame if multiple faces are in view. When you use the feature for single-person portraits, you can adjust the settings to tell the camera to focus on either the left or right eye, or you can let the camera decide. Ultimately there are so many options to adjust for autofocus that it can be a tad intimidating, but we think photographers who buy a camera of this complexity will take the time to learn to adjust it to their liking.

You can find plenty of dials and buttons on the X-T3, a good number of which you can customize, though for the core controls of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, you can use dials on top of the camera and the aperture ring found on many of Fujifilm’s lenses, including the 16–80mm f/4 kit lens. Using the dials, you can adjust those settings before you even turn the camera on, and in the case of ISO and shutter speed, those dials have locks so you can shoot without worrying about nudging them accidentally. Of course, if you prefer, you can choose to use the front and rear common wheels to change shutter speed and aperture, as you would with a DSLR, so in the end, you can have the best of both DSLR- and rangefinder-like shooting in one camera.

If you’re serious about photography, you probably like to use a viewfinder to frame your shots. Holding the camera up to your face makes it easier to hold it still than when you hold it out in front of you to use the screen instead. When we tested the X-T2, we noted that its EVF was one of the best that you could get, and Fujifilm has updated it such that the X-T3’s finder still offers a class-leading experience. It provides a large view of the scene and gives all the information that you could want to see while shooting. In manual focus mode, it shows the distance that the lens is focused to and can automatically enlarge the portion of the frame around whichever AF point you’ve selected. You can enlarge it a step further by scrolling the rear command wheel. Like many mirrorless cameras, it also has focus peaking, which uses a color overlay to highlight areas with sharp edge contrast to show what is in focus. There are also the split-view and micro-prism focus assist tools, which overlay horizontal stripes or a grid of squares, respectively, to help you manually align the phase of light coming into the camera, but we didn’t find these tools quite as useful as the peaking or magnification features.

As DPReview notes in its review, “the X-T3 shoots stunning video.” We agree. It can capture 4K 30 fps video using the entire width of the camera sensor or 4K 60 fps with a 1.18x crop of the frame. In either case the camera uses 10 bits per color channel, compared with the 8-bit capture you typically see from mirrorless cameras that capture 4K video. This means that it’s capturing significantly more information, which directly translates to better-looking colors and more detail in the videos. You also have the option for HD video at up to 60 fps, or if you accept a 1.29x crop you can shoot at 120 fps for varying degrees of slow-motion video by letting the camera output the final video at anywhere between 24 fps and 60 fps.

In addition to the various resolution and frame-rate options, the X-T3 has both microphone and headphone jacks, so you can use a professional-grade microphone and monitor the sound with headphones in real time. If you often use an external video recorder such as the Atomos Ninja V, the X-T3 can send a clean HDMI feed to the recorder for even higher-quality results. High-end video shooters will also appreciate that the camera includes various “Log” settings that let you have an enormous amount of control over colors (through a process called color grading), but if you’re not at that level of videography, know that you’ll need to do a good deal of learning before you can take advantage of that.

As is typical for mirrorless cameras, you can connect the X-T3 to your smartphone to control the camera from a distance or to transfer images to your phone so that you can share them right away. Setup is simple, though you have to remember to select the camera’s Wi-Fi signal instead of any router that you might have the phone connected to before using the QR code displayed on the camera screen to establish the connection. This means you won’t have to enter any information on the camera, and you’ll have to do this only once per device; after that you’ll be able to control all the most important camera settings, see a live preview of the image to be captured, and tap the screen to focus or to capture the image.

Like the X-T2 before it, the X-T3 boasts a high level of weather sealing, so you should be able to take it out in severe weather conditions without worrying about anything other than a slew of water droplets bombarding the front of your lens and getting in the way of whatever you’re trying to shoot. The images you snap might end up humdrum, but that’s through no fault of the camera, and the gear should remain safe and ready to use another day. We didn’t get to test the weather sealing, as we were unable to get outside during a sufficient rainstorm here in New York City during our field testing, but we can point out that Dave Pardue of Imaging Resource took the X-T2 out to shoot during a tropical storm, and the camera withstood that challenge with aplomb. We expect that the X-T3 would fare just as well.

Other benefits of the X-T3’s camera body include a dual-hinged screen that tilts up and down and can angle to the right so that you can shoot low to the ground or from hip level with the camera in portrait position. Plus, the camera has two UHS-II–compatible SD card slots so you can assign JPEG images to one card and raw images to the other, split between stills and video, or just write everything to both cards simultaneously for an instant mirrored backup. This is a feature that you won’t find on less expensive models but is helpful to professionals and semi-pros for organizing or for peace of mind in the event of card failure. Also, you can set the camera to use the second card as overflow should the first card fill up, though high-capacity cards make this problem nearly moot.

Despite all the great things about the X-T3, we have a few minor gripes. First, the two highest sensitivity settings of ISO 25,600 and ISO 51,200 are considered “extended” in Fujifilm’s opinion, so you have to go into the menu and select one of them to assign to the ISO dial. Since the ISO dial has only one position beyond ISO 12,800 and it’s labeled “H,” you have to choose one or the other of the extended ISOs.

Our second gripe is that you have to tunnel through the Set Up menu to a submenu called User Setting if you want to format an SD card in the camera. Since it’s always best to format your card before you go out shooting and then try to offload your images at the end of the day, this menu item should have a home where it’s more easily found.

Third, though it’s common for cameras of this level not to include a flash, we wish the X-T3 had one. A pop-up flash isn’t necessarily the best way to light a photo, but it can come in handy to fill out shadows in a portrait on a sunny day. Plus, a pop-up flash can work to trigger accessory lights. If you think you’ll need a flash, you have to opt for an accessory flash from either Fujifilm or a third party.

Last, the battery life, though not awful, is only 390 shots per charge, and in order to attain that the X-T3 slightly dims the screen and reduces its refresh rate if you’ve left the camera on but haven’t done anything with it for more than 12 seconds. We’d prefer to have a choice of whether to use that kind of energy-saving mode, and we also wish the shots per charge were more in the range of the high 400s or more.