X100VI vs Leica Q3 and Q3 43: what the money buys

Fujifilm X100VI against the Leica Q3 and Q3 43: focal length, equivalent aperture, weight, price, and what owners of both cameras say.

By Abu Ashraf Masnun · August 16, 2026

Every few weeks somebody posts the same question in r/Leica or r/fujifilm. They have an X100VI, they have handled a Q3 in a shop, and now they want to know whether the Leica is worth roughly five times the money. Sometimes it is the other way round: they own the Q3, they are scared to take it out of the house, and they are wondering if a Fuji would actually get used. I have owned an X100VI and I read those threads because I find them genuinely interesting, so I finally sat down and did the maths and the reading properly.

There are two Leicas in this fight, not one. The Q3 has a 28mm f/1.7 Summilux. The Q3 43 has a 43mm f/2 APO-Summicron. Fujifilm's 23mm on APS-C gives a 35mm-equivalent view, which puts the X100VI between the two of them and much closer to the 43. So the Q3 43 is the fairer comparison, even though most people compare the X100VI to the regular Q3.

How much fits in the picture

Diagonal angle of view is the number that makes this concrete. A 28mm lens on full frame sees about 75 degrees. A 35mm sees about 63. A 43mm sees about 53. So moving from the X100VI to the Q3 puts a lot more in the frame, and moving to the Q3 43 puts a little less in. With the 28 you stand close and get the whole room. With the 43 you take a step or two back and get your subject.

That 43mm is not a random number, by the way. A full-frame sensor measures 36mm by 24mm, and if you measure it corner to corner you get about 43mm. Lens designers call that the normal focal length, because photos taken with it look closest to the way your own eyes see a scene. Nothing stretches at the edges the way it can at 28mm, and nothing looks squashed flat the way it can at 85mm. Leica built a camera around that one focal length, and priced it accordingly.

One argument comes up in every single thread about the two Leicas, and it is correct: you can crop a 28 into a 43, and you cannot uncrop a 43. On the 60MP Q3, a 43mm crop still leaves about 25MP, and a 35mm crop leaves about 38MP. So a Q3 with the 35mm frameline is, in a real sense, a very expensive X100VI with more resolution. Several r/Leica regulars say that is exactly how they shoot it.

The Fuji can play the same trick, just not as far. The X100VI's digital teleconverter gives you 50mm and 70mm equivalents, so it steps straight past 43mm rather than landing on it. To match the Q3 43's framing you crop the 40MP file by hand and end up with about 27MP, which is still more than enough for anything short of a wall print.

How much light each lens lets in

This is where the Leica earns its money, and it caught me out, because when I ran these same numbers on the GFX100RF I got the opposite answer. That camera has a much bigger sensor than the X100VI, but Fujifilm put a slow f/4 lens in front of it, so the two cameras end up giving you about the same blurred background and about the same ability in low light. A big sensor does not win anything on its own. It only wins if the lens in front of it is fast as well. Both Leicas have fast lenses, so this time the gap is real.

An f-number on its own does not tell you much across two different sensor sizes, so the trick is to convert everything into full-frame terms first. The X100VI's lens says f/2 on the barrel, but on an APS-C sensor it behaves like an f/3.0 lens on full frame. Both Leicas are full frame already, so their numbers need no conversion at all.

Fujifilm X100VI: a 35mm view, behaving like f/3.0.
Leica Q3: a 28mm view at f/1.7.
Leica Q3 43: a 43mm view at f/2.

So the Q3 43 is a little over a stop ahead of the X100VI, and the Q3 is about one and two thirds of a stop ahead. That number is doing two jobs at once, because it covers background blur and light-gathering together. A stop of it means noticeably more separation between your subject and the background, and it means a cleaner picture in a dim room. Anyone who tells you the difference between these cameras is imaginary has not done this sum. The money buys something real.

What it does not buy is a stop of usable shutter speed, because the X100VI has six stops of in-body stabilisation and neither Leica has IBIS at all. The Q3 lenses have optical stabilisation, which helps, but it is not the same thing. One owner of both put it in a single line: the Q3 43 wins in every case for photography except stabilisation. That matches what I would expect from the spec sheets.

How big they feel to carry

The X100VI is 521g and 55mm deep. The Q3 is 743g, the Q3 43 is 772g, and both are around 93 to 98mm deep. Width and height are within a couple of millimetres of each other, so every side-by-side photo makes them look like siblings. They are not. The Leica is nearly twice as thick and carries about half a pound more, and all of that is out front where it levers on your neck.

The Fujifilm goes in a coat pocket. The Leica goes in a bag. That sounds like a small thing until you read the Japan thread, where a long-time Leica shooter who has owned an M6, an M240, an M10, an M11, a Q2, a Q3 and a Q3 43 took the X100VI and the Q3 43 on a week's trip, and the Q3 43 stayed at the hotel for the entire week. Not because it takes worse pictures. Because he kept picking up the smaller one.

Weather sealing runs the other way. The Q3 and Q3 43 are IP52 rated out of the box, tested and certified. The X100VI is only sealed once you add the adapter ring and a protective filter, which is an extra purchase and one more thing to lose. If you shoot in rain regularly, that is a point to Leica and it is not a small one.

What only the Fuji can do

The hybrid viewfinder. The Q3 has a lovely 5.76M-dot EVF and it is better than the Fuji EVF, but there is no optical finder on any Q, and for a lot of X100 shooters the OVF is the reason the camera exists.
A built-in flash. Weak, tiny, and the thing you reach for at a dinner table. Neither Leica has one.
A built-in four-stop ND filter on a menu item. The Q3 43 has no internal ND, which is a genuine gap on an f/2 lens in daylight.
Six stops of IBIS. Both Leicas rely on optical stabilisation in the lens instead.
Close focus to 10cm. The Q3 gets to 30cm normally and 17cm in macro mode; the Q3 43 gets to 60cm normally and 27cm in macro mode. Photographing your lunch on a Q3 43 means switching modes and leaning back.
Film simulations, and the whole recipe ecosystem around them. Leica Looks exist and owners describe them as fine rather than good.
Battery life of about 450 CIPA shots against roughly 350 on either Q3.
The price. 1,599 USD against 7,350 for the Q3 and 7,950 for the Q3 43 at Leica US as I write this.

What only the Leicas can do

A 60MP full-frame sensor, with the dynamic range and shadow latitude that come with it.
The lenses. The 43mm APO-Summicron in particular is the single most praised thing in every thread I read, and the praise is specific: sharp wide open, sharp in the corners, and clean of colour fringing.
IP52 weather sealing with nothing bolted on.
A leaf shutter that syncs flash to 1/2000, and an electronic shutter to 1/16000.
DNG straight out of the camera, so Lightroom imports without a conversion step. One owner who shot Fuji for nine years said this alone noticeably shortened his import time.
Crop framelines composed in the finder. The Q3 gives 35, 50, 75 and 90mm; the Q3 43 gives 60, 75, 90, 120 and 150mm.
A macro mode that actually shifts the optics rather than just letting you focus closer.
Autofocus that owners say jumped after the 4.0 firmware, to the point where it is no longer something they think about.

What people who own both say

I went looking for people who own both rather than people with opinions about both. I have put it in my own words rather than quoting them, and every thread is linked at the bottom of this article.

The most useful answer in the whole r/Leica comparison thread came from someone who bought the X100VI first specifically to avoid spending Leica money, used it for a few months, admitted he did not enjoy it, and switched. His method for picking between the two Leicas is worth stealing: he opened Lightroom, filtered his 24-70mm shots by focal length, found that most of them landed between 40 and 45mm, and bought the 43 on that basis. He also says the Fuji feels flimsy and the menus are hard to work with. Enough people say the same thing that I am not going to argue with him.

In the same thread, an owner of both describes the split by job rather than by quality: the Fuji is the snapshot camera he hands to friends and takes anywhere, and the Leica is the one he uses for landscape work he prints large. Another owner who has had a Q3 28, an X100VI, a Nikon Zf and a 50mm sold everything except the Q3 and says the relief of having no decisions left to make is most of the appeal.

The counterweight comes from someone who has owned the Q3, the X100VI, a Ricoh GR III and an RX1R II, and sold all of them except the Fuji. His reasoning is the one that keeps recurring: these are all second cameras next to an interchangeable-lens kit, and once the compact stops being small enough to make a difference, he reaches for the bigger camera instead. Same conclusion as the Japan thread, from the opposite direction.

On files, the most useful post is an X100VI and Q3 owner who shot the same scenes with both and posted crops. The Q3 is visibly sharper stopped down, holds contrast much better against the sun, and recovers shadows further. The comment underneath that I keep thinking about is that the Fuji fails successfully: you can see exactly where it runs out, and the pictures are still lovely. Someone else in that thread argues the gap is as much the lens as the sensor, and points out that an X-T5 with a good XF prime closes most of it.

There is one thread that should be required reading before you spend the money. A photographer moved from the X100VI to a Q3 and then realised he had no idea how to edit, because Fujifilm's film simulations had been doing that job for him for years. The Leica DNG is flat and neutral on purpose. That is a feature if you edit, and a cliff if you do not.

And the version of this question I find hardest to argue with came from a Q3 owner on r/fujifilm last week, who was thinking of selling because he is nervous about damaging the camera when he is out with it. The top reply is the correct one: if you are scared to take it out, it does not matter which camera is better, because you are not using it.

Getting the 43mm look on a Fuji

There is no fixed-lens Fujifilm at that angle of view, but there is an obvious lens for it. A 30mm on APS-C gives a 45mm-equivalent view, which is within a whisker of the Q3 43, and Fujifilm's XF 30mm f/2.8 Macro focuses to 1:1 on top of that. Put it on an X-E5 and you have a 445g rangefinder-styled body, IBIS, the film simulation dial, and the 43mm-ish framing, for well under a fifth of what Leica charges.

If you want the closest thing to the Q3 43's rendering rather than its framing, the XF 33mm f/1.4 is the one. It is a 50mm equivalent at an equivalent f/2.1, which is the same depth of field the Q3 43 gives you, from a lens that costs about 800 USD. You give up the full-frame sensor and the APO glass. You keep most of the look.

Which one should you buy

If money genuinely is not a factor and you want the best pictures out of a fixed-lens camera, buy the Q3 43. I am not going to pretend otherwise. A stop of equivalent aperture, 60 full-frame megapixels and an APO lens are not marketing, and the owners who bought one are unusually happy in a way that gear threads rarely are.

If you shoot at 35mm and you are not sure 43 is your focal length, buy the Q3 28 instead and use the 35mm frameline. You get 38MP at the framing you already like, plus the option of going wide, and the 43mm crop is still there when you want it. The one thing you cannot do is uncrop.

If money is a factor at all, or if you already know that you leave expensive cameras at home, buy the X100VI. It is a quarter of the weight difference, a fifth of the price, it stabilises six stops, it focuses to 10cm, it has a flash and an ND filter and an optical finder, and it produces JPEGs you can post without opening Lightroom. The Leica takes better pictures. The Fuji takes more of them.

For what it is worth, I sold my X100VI for an X-E5 because I wanted to change lenses, and then bought another X100VI anyway. At no point in that loop did I seriously consider spending 7,950 USD on a camera I would be afraid to put in my bag. That is a statement about me, not about the Q3 43.

Where to buy them

Prices move constantly and Leica has raised its US prices more than once, so treat these as a starting point rather than a quote.