This $14 silicone eyecup made me love my camera again

I absolutely love my camera. It’s a Fujifilm X-S10 that I finally bought after years of owning Sony mirrorless cameras with colors I absolutely hated.

You just can’t beat the X-S10; it has Fujifilm’s incredible X-Trans IV 26.1 megapixel sensor, IBIS, great manual controls for a camera this small, and of course Fuji’s amazing film emulations. And you get all this for $1,000!

As good as it is, it’s still a $1,000 camera, and that means that some corners needed to be cut. Sadly one of those corners is the viewfinder. I don’t have any issues with the brightness or resolution, it’s just too darn small. I like to shoot with vintage lenses, and even with focus peaking and focus assist it can be hard to see if things are actually in focus on the X-S10’s small viewfinder.

The other day I got fed up with this situation and decided to see if there was anything that could be done. While it’s not feasible to actually increase the magnification of the viewfinder, large, luxurious eyecups that block out surrounding light are the next best thing, and these have been around for as long as viewfinders have existed.

Curiously, some of Fujifilm’s more consumer-oriented cameras have fixed, non-removable eyecups on their viewfinders making replacement eyecups impossible, or at least that’s what I thought. As soon as I started searching around, the “Soft Silicon Camera Viewfinder Eyecup Eyeshade for Fuji Fujifilm X-S10 XS10 X-T200 XT200 Eyepiece Eye” popped up in my results. Holy shit.

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Specialty photo equipment is usually quite expensive, so I was pretty happy with the $13.99 price tag even though it is plastic. In my brief time with it, I don’t think that this eyecup will stand up to heavy abuse, but it’s also not fragile. It feels like high quality injection-molded plastic.

How is this modest little eyecup in use? Incredible. I can finally see what I’m doing in the viewfinder. Especially now during the long days of summer, I can actually use my vintage lenses outside in bright conditions without contorting my entire face to squint into the viewfinder.

The other nice thing about this random little eyecup is that there are surprisingly precise cutouts for the diopter dial and the outer edge of the viewfinder, making the connection surprisingly tight and reliable-feeling. There's also a precise cutout for the proximity sensor below the viewfinder, so that works, and while the eyecup does overlap with the screen slightly, if you’re careful you can easily flip it out without removing the eyecup.

So should you get one of these suckers for your Fujifilm camera? Do you like seeing what you’re doing? Then yes, what are you waiting for!? It’s $14!