Do you want a fuji x camera?

Pure speculation:

Do you want a Fujifilm x camera?

Designing a camera is really hard work. Not just like: "We had to put in lots of hours"-hard or even "We needed to hire really competent and expensive engineers to make this"-hard. No, i mean really hard, like:  "We had to start all over several times and scrap years of work to get a satisfactory result"-hard or "Quite often we have to give up and realise the product will not reach the market in time"-hard. Trying to design a camera that is neither a copy of the current market standard nor a mere set of good specs, but rather a camera that will find its customers by offering them a unique and better shooting experience is even harder than that.

First, one have to know what a "normal" camera is, how it is to use it, why it is built like it is, from both a photographers perspective and an engineering perspective and how to build and market it. Fuck, that is hard. Nobody can know all of that and that's why we have camera manufacturing corps and not one man camera shops.

When you have gathered all that competence, you still need to be able to ponder:
-We are not good enough, we need to turn taking photos into a different kind of experience. OMG, how do we do that?
Somehow you have to find the answer to that and then the really hard work starts. Now you need to convince everybody in the production team that they are fundamentally wrong about what a camera should really be like and that your vision is better. If you think: "I could do that!". Just try to convince even a single person they are wrong about how they should perform their work and that you know better!

Keeping that vision in the minds of all the staff will then be your never ending and most important task. Whenever they make a decision they have to consider what choice leads neither to a product that consumers recognise, a slightly easier development nor more profit in the short or medium run, but only what leads to a the envisioned different kind of shooting experience.

So, when one day, your head of firmware development approaches you and says:
- Boss, you know this new sensor that we are working with, it can do 4k video. We already have five black and white film simulation modes and if we skip acros we will have time to implement 4k video.
When that happens, its decision time. You know 4k is one of the hot buss words  in the business and you know that most reviewers will say:
- Acros looks nice, but i shoot raw. 4k would have been useful.
You could just say, go with 4k then, but in your heart you know it is hard work time.

You send the firmware guy away with a camera, 5 rolls of across and 5 rolls of other iso 100 b&w films. Since you even considered him being right, you decide to shoot some acros yourself too. After a week or two, you have a few beers with him and the longer the evening gets, the more the both of you whine about how you never want to shoot digital again. But in the end you know what you have to do.

Next day you call him back to you office and tell him:
- Yesterday at the pub, we talked about the film experience as a whole but we can't implement all that in our next camera. So today tell me about something we can do something about,  tell me about acros and what sets it aside from the rest of the films you shot!
He starts with praising the details compared to the hp5+, the lack of reciprocity compared to t-max, the flatness compared to tri-x but that is just general praise of a good film. Not until he starts talking about how the tonality differs and how contrasty photo paper he was able to use when making copies without loosing details in the shadows do you know you have the vision back in his mind.

You tell him:
- People spend hours in front of their computers instead of behind their cameras trying to achieve that look, and they do it over and over again. Now go back to your team and make them understand why we can't release this camera before we can save our customers from those hours of post processing.

Later that day the head of user interface design knocks on your door and you know there is more hard work to be done...

_________________

I want a camera made with that passion. Of course, i don't know what happens behind Fuji's doors and i don't really care whether i'm even close to anything that could resemble the truth with this story. But i do care that it feels like its designed with this kind of passion. That catching up with better specs and new features that other brands introduce only comes after making shooting more fun, more passionate and with less post work. It brightens my day and frees my nights up from using Lightroom.

Thanks Fujifilm for putting in all this hard work to be able to produce cameras like this!

Now i only wish i could afford an x-pro2 as well.
I don't know if you want one, but I sure know that I do.

An alternative to IBIS

An alternative to IBIS

For some reason, there are always loud advocates for image stabilisation on the sensor in the camps of Fuji, Canon and Nikon. For certain reasons these companies are not yet interested in the tech. I am with the companies on this , i think there are a lot better things to put time and resources into when there is even better stabilised lenses to get when i need them. With that said, there is one product i'd love to see.

Those of you that are old enough to remember the auto focus introduction in SLR:s in the 80:s would remember the TC-16A from Nikon.

Someone at Nikon came up with the idea that people would like to use their old manual focus lenses with autofocus. Not a bad thought, i might add. Sadly it was hampered by the fact that every lens turned into a 1.6 times longer lens, very much like if you had put them on a half frame camera. Nevertheless Nikon sold their fair share of TC-16A:s and some people still buy them today on the second hand market.

Quite a few years later, Metabones came up with a similar idea. With lots of mirrorless cameras on the market with aps-c or smaller cameras lots of people tend to want to use their SLR glass on their new cameras. There are only three problems.

1. A regular SLR lens has 1.5 times narrower (measured in mm) field of view on a aps-c sensor than they were made for.
2. A lens made to cover 24x36mm film lose half its resolving power on an aps-c sensor.
3. The flange distance will still be the same. Thus the adapter has to be a long tube making the lens+adapter very large on an short flanged and small mirrorless camera.
   
   
   Metabones managed to almost completely overcome these problems with their speed booster. 

It works more or less like a magnifier. If you put it on the camera and look into it, you see a sensor the size of 24x36 mm instead of the 18x24 mm sensor that is really there. All the light from the adapted lens is thus gathered with all of the lenses resolving power preserved. For sure, there is a loss of quality by going through the extra lens elements, but it is a lot less than only using half of the lens.

Now back to our Fuji cameras. What if we had a combination of the speedbooster and the TC-16A. A Fuji made focal length reducer with a floating element for autofocus and image stabilisation with a canon FD mount in the front. The relatively short register of the FD mount and the lock ring that tightens the mount very hard allows for adapters to be fitted to mount almost any SLR lens. We would be able to use our Canon FL, FD, EOS, Nikon F, Pentax K, M42, old Fujica X and even Leica R lenses with both image stabilisation and auto focus. A Metabones speedbooster is expensive and a Fuji made focal lenght reduser with that kind of capability would at least be twice the price. But there is no doubt i would cash up for it even if i had to sell one of my beloved cameras to afford it.

And let's not forget the best part. We can show it up the throat of those "I need IBIS to take good photographs"-whiners.

Facts and speculations: Update on the organic sensor

Facts and speculations:Update on the organic sensor

In 2014 i wrote this about the organic sensors and what role it could have in the future digital imaging market. Much of it still holds true and there has been very little news on the subject until last month. Now Panasonic has gone public with some more information about the technology itself and way to apply it to reduce motions blur and flicker when using what we today would call an electronic shutter.

First, lets ask ourselves why they go public at all with this! They could have just kept silent about it until they had an actual product to sell. There are a number of possible reasons for going public, everything from that they don't have the resources to finalise a product themselves to that they want to start a buzz or wanting to protect their patents. We can't really know what combination of reasons that made them disclose the information, but we can draw conclusions about what they are not planning. They do not intend to take the world by surprise, suddenly shipping cameras with organic sensors. That makes perfect sense too, the digital sensors of today are getting rather close to what is theoretically possible in terms of low noise and high DR. At some point in the not so far off future, the best way to compete in that market will no longer be by performance, but rather by getting the production cost down. Whenever an organic sensor would reach the market, that future would probably already be upon us and getting the prices down is all about volume and production efficiency and almost nothing about virgin tech.

With that said, lets go back to the announcements. What first strikes me is that they have upped the promised dynamic range from 88dB to 123dB by applying Fujis old Super CCD  SR II structure of mixing large and small photodiodes. From the experience of the Finepix S5 Pro we know this works remarkably well. That old sensor from 2006 with 6Mp of high sensitive and 6Mp of low sensitive was very popular by wedding photographers for its high dynamic range and still beats modern cameras in that department. It didn't deliver the same detail as a 12Mp sensor of the time, but still a lot more than a 6Mp one. 123dB of DR would amount to almost 41 stops, compare that with the best 24x36mm sensors of today that has just past 15 stops.

Further more, have a look at this passage: "In OPF CMOS image sensor, charge-storage function and photoelectric-conversion function can be set independently." If you look here and here. The orange rectangles called charge storage node and floating diffusion is the charge-storage function in the above quote. A floating diffusion is usually an isolated part of a chip that can store charge without being affected of what goes on in the rest of the chip. The photoelectric conversion is done by the film, the organic part of the sensor. Combine this information with: "Wide incident angle (60 degrees), high sensitivity, high saturation and highly-functional circuits due to a unique feature of OPF, in which an OPF for photoelectric-conversion and a readout circuits are independent." and focus of the last 5 words. This sensor can actually be built into 3 different parts that can work independent of each other. For example, one could have a large OPF with charge storage behind all the film, but the chip that actually does the readout could be a lot smaller and travel behind the film to cover the whole area. This would make it even more suitable for very large formats than i previously believed. Instead of the cost increasing linear to the sensor area compared to exponential for conventional sensors the cost of a twice the size organic sensor would be less than twice the price if one accept a longer readout time. For a large format photographer a few seconds of readout time is nothing, as long as the capture time is the same all over the image.

In the 2014 text, i also mentioned the state of the camera market as such. Not much have changed, but there are a few things worth mentioning.

1. There are now 645 full frame sensors available on the market. They are very expensive, but not that much more expensive than crop 645 sensors were a few years ago. Production has thus become more efficient and it will become even more efficient before we see an organic medium format sensor.
2. Sony acquired Toshiba's sensor department. Toshiba was important it was one of the few remaining competitors to Sony in the small frame sensor market. Nikon for example, can no longer ask if Toshiba can make a cheaper sensor than what Sony offers when they need a new one.
3. Canon is lagging even more behind in the DR department. They still have almost 50% of the market, but sooner och later this will catch up with them and they know it. Not upgrading their fabs to modern standard for 10 years was a very smart and brave decision and has so far not cost them that much while saving a lot of money, but the time brave turn into foolish is getting closer every day. 
4. Fuji film are slowly increasing their semi-conductor production. They just announced the establishing of a new plant. It's not a big one, the investment is about $8.4 million, but it tells us that they are expanding nevertheless. 
5. When i wrote the old text Fuji X system and the Samsung mirrorless systems were up and coming. Now Fuji X is established and Samsung looks to be abandoning their mirrorless effort.

Speculations

The facts that Panasonic is this public about the organic sensor, that the competition in the small frame sensor market is decreasing and that Canon has still not caught up with Sony in DR is opening up a slim chance that Panasonic is aiming for something bigger than i expected in 2014. I say slim, because the problem of getting the production cost down so early in the development is almost impossible. But somehow it does fit the facts and if Panasonic could get Canon onboard they would at least have the volume needed to actually aim for the small frame mass market.

Still, if that would become true, the impact on the small frame market would still be nothing compared to what it would do to the large and medium format markets.

Enough speculation, in a few more years, we may actually know something.