The X-T2 - the end of an era

Until now, the x series has been all about photography. We have all felt it, the cameras walk, talk and look like cameras. The knobs are in the right places, the needs of photographers have been dictating the firmware updates and development of new models.

With x-t2, the heat produced by 4k dictates the internal airflow design of the camera, some of the precious firmware development resources will be put on video features and bug fixes, not to mention the extra buffer memory that could have been there if all those video modes were not there. If it sells well among videographers, designers of future models will consult both photographers and video shooters regarding ergonomics, button layout and lens needs.

Ofcourse more sales at least in theory will come with more resources to r&d which hopefully can negate some of the drawbacks. But there is no question about it, from time to time there will be choices between what is best for photographers and what is best for videographers and from now on fuji will have to consider both groups. Thats why video cameras and camcorders dont look like still cameras and why spoons dont look like forks.

Let's hope we don't end up with a spork like those sonys and panasonics out there!

The MMF (mirrorless medium format) wishlist

Tomorrow, Hasselblad will announce their MMF. It's going to be fancy and expensive for sure and hopefully good and even groundbreaking. Given the history of cooperation between HB and Fujifilm with the H series, xpan and Fuji manufacturing HB lenses, there is a good chance Fuji is involved somehow. But let's leave exactly how and how much to when we know more and dream away a bit of what a Fujifilm MMF could offer!

Here is my wishlist in short (details follows):

1. 33x44
2. Price
3. X system look, feel and handling
4. EVF
5. Small size and low weight
6. Good lenses
7. DR and low light performance
8. Protect the sensor
9. Filming

33x44

There is only one sensor that makes sense for a Fuji MMF today. The sony 50Mp, roughly twice the size of a regular small frame (FF DSLR) picture frame. Anything larger would be too expensive and make the camera bigger. It's uses more or less the same tech as the x-trans II sensor, only it's about four times bigger. I will simply not wish for anything better, because i wouldn't want to pay the price for it. If Sony has improved it by making a second generation that gives the same or better performance at a lower price, i am all for it, of course.

Price

It has to be lower than the Hasselblad MMF, but it will most certainly be more expensive than a A7R2. Lets wish for closer to the Sony than the HB.

Look, feel and handling

Fuji has done very well with the x system in this regard. Lets hope they don't spend any money on doing it in a new way. An x-pro2 like body back and top with a better iso-dial would do great. They may go for x-t2 like, but losing the street and action photography advantage of seeing things moving into the frame that you get with the HVF would really be a petty on a small MMF.

The front will have to be different with bigger mount and i hope they will add a bigger grip to cope with more of the weight in the front.

They may even start with a fixed lens version or a step zoom like their 645z and go for interchangeable mount later. I think we will get a hint about that with the HB release tomorrow.

Bringing in the film simulations are crucial, lots of photographers are so happy with the jpegs that they only use the raws in special cases and Fuji will need them to tag along to MMF to get the volume up.

EVF

They could make an optical viewfinder only camera like the ga645 ones, but i really hope we will have a hybrid viewfinder. It has to be competitive, but not market leading in size and refresh rate.

Small size and low weight

This is arguably the very key to the product, thus i will elaborate quite a bit more on this subject.

How small can a MF be?

Well, have a look at the Voigtländer Bessa RF. It fits in a large pocket and it has 6x9cm picture frame.

That's about four times larger than 33x44!!!

How can that be?

Well, it's all about extendable flange. If you put a lens (or even a very small hole) 65mm away from the film or sensor, it will have the focal length of 65mm, hence the name. The amount of glass you need is minimal and you focus closer than infinity by moving the lens further away. However, if one want to keep the same flange and use a longer lens, you either need more and heavier glass or you have to put a longer barrel on the lens between the camera mount and the lens package. Let’s compare a regular 85mm DSLR lens with a 210mm large format lens (about the same angle of view on 4x5” as the 85 on the 24x36mm). The large format lens is very small and covers an image circle that is several magnitudes bigger than the DSLR lens. The drawback is that it has to be placed 8-9” away from the film.

When you make a fixed flange camera, like a DSLR or Fuji X or the Sony A7 you can make use of this when making a lens that has the same focal length of the flange of the camera. Just like Sony did with the 20/2.8 that more or less gave it it’s reputation of being a small and lightweight system. The price with such a short flange is that there has to be a tube on every lens making longer lenses big and bulky. If you, once again like Sony, add IBIS to the equation, making the sensors effectively bigger by moving it around, your long tube problem piles up on a wide problem and lens size goes from small to big to huge.

So how to solve it? Fuji already did on the ga645 cameras. On them a retractable tube can be telescoped into the camera when not in use. Bellows works just as well and are cheaper but comes with durability issues.

On the Fujifilm MMF i wish for a retractable tube with a lens mount in the front. This would provide all the following.

• Small and light lenses regardless of focal length. Fast lenses will ofcourse be bigger than slow, but that's just as it is.
• Design choices on auto focus. The lenses can have internal motors for fast focusing or money and weight can be saved by using the slow but accurate focusing method of moving the tube.
• The camera would be very flat with the tube retracted.
• Almost any lens that covers 33x44 could be mounted and used with slow but accurate AF.

In the end i wish for the camera plus a few lenses to fit in the same bag that holds an Canikon DSLR or a Sony A7 with equivalent lenses. If the camera with a small lens could fit in one of the large pockets of my jacket i would pay $500 more.

Good lenses

Fuji knows how to make good small frame lenses, good medium format lenses and good large format lenses. If they make the effort, they will make good 33x44 lenses. I just wish they will focus on that rather than dirt cheap or lots of lens options early on. If they build the camera smart, there will be enough options by adapting lenses while they expand the system slowly.

DR and low light performance

We know what we get with this Sony sensor, it performs well and Fuji will tweak it a little further. Two stops better than aps-c is the mark to reach for, but 1.5 is good enough.

Protect the sensor

Please Fuji! There should be a shutter-like thingy that covers the sensor when the lens release button is pressed and opens when next lens clicks into place. Why don’t we have this already?

Filming

Any minute on spending R&D time and resources on filming features are wasted on me. But if it pays itself by reaching a larger audience i'm all for as long as they don’t dedicate any buttons or knobs for filming and that fiming settings don’t get in the way of finding useful menu entries and alike.

Pure speculations: The G4433 - the digital exchangable lens folder

Do you remember this?

That is the GS645, Fuji's pocketable 6x4.5cm rangefinder from the mid 80s. Folding rangefinders are usually single lens cameras. The lenses are usually neither tele nor wide angle designs, but sits at the same distance from the film as their focal length. That way the lenses can be kept very small even if they are of the best possible quality, much like large format lenses. Up until now, digital folders and interchangeable folders have been scarce. It is very hard to create a rangefinder system that is reliable with different lenses. Every lens needs its own cam and they also need different infinity stops.

However, now we have EVF and phase detection pixels on digital sensors. We neither need a proper rangefinder nor a big mirror flapping around to focus. The implications are very interesting. One now could build a folder with swappable lenses or even with an extending telescopic tube like on pocket cameras or the ga645 cameras, only with a mount at the end where one could attach very light and small lenses. And we still could focus them just as well as with an x-t1 or x-e2.

The current rumours says Fujis next camera system will be a digital one with a large 50Mp sensor. That fits perfectly with the excellent dwarfed medium format sensor of the Pentax 645Z. (Dont worry, with its 44x33mm it's still almost twice the size of a full small frame sensor.  Put an xtrans filter on it and put it in a ga- or gs645 package and it will be an excellent sony a7 killer.

Ofcourse I could be totally wrong or the Fuji MF rumour could be nothing but a rumour, but a G4433 fits the specs well and it would be very very Fujiesque.

Resurrecting peel apart pack film

The facts

When polaroid went out of business, most of the options for peel apart pack film shooters was lost,. Among them the 665, the last pos+neg pack film. The only remaining producer was Fujifilm with colour and b&w positive only pack film. The emulsions were nothing but amazing with vivid colours and deep blacks in less than a minute of shooting.

Nevertheless, in the years since, sales were diverted to instax and one after another, they discontinued every emulsion and every size of pack film and as of this week, the production is stopped. Does this mean the era of peel apart pack film is over for ever?

Former approaches

When fp-3000b, the ultrafast b&w was discontinued the other year, approaches was made to buy the machinery to resume production. They were met with zero interest from Fuji. With all production ended they may not need their machines anymore and that may or may not change their minds. But we do not know whether they are useful at all without the Fuji emulsions. It could even be that they are broken and beyond affordable repair and that is why the production stopped.

Even if the machines work, Fujifilm may not want to sell them. Most of their photography business, instax in particular but digital as well and even some other branches like cosmetics rely heavily on Fujis know how in film production. Let's face it, there is no way they will ever let a third party know what their emulsions are made of and the same goes for coating if they have secrets to protect in that area as well. That is the core of their business.

What can be done

There is still a chance that some (or all) of the machinery could be sold without risking any trade secrets. Maybe they could be cleaned and modified to protect them. I do not know, but if someone want to give it a try, they have my support and that of many others. 

A word of advice though. Approach Fujifilm with both passion for the film and with great respect for both their right to protect their business and for their decision to discontinue peel apart pack film. They know they have ended an era and they did not do i lightly.

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.