Fuji X100 Digital SOMETHING from Fujifilm

There are times when I cannot lug around a system in a bag. I need a camera that I can carry in my coat pocket. I want the option of an evf, but with a conventional ovf. I want it to be quick and preferably with autofocus. I need + and - ev at my fingertips. All of this, but I don't want a point and shoot. Could this X100 be the one? I sure hope so.
 
Just re-watched that hands-on demo.

  1. The thumbwheel on the top-back is definitely going to be set to ISO by default, at least on mine. I can't believe anyone would complain about this camera not having a dedicated ISO dial (I'm looking at you, Thom).
  2. The flash is stupid. I think the size is poor and the placement is poor. I suppose they need this camera to still be marketable as a complete package for the P&S crowd, but I will turn this flash off on day 1 and never turn it back on. I hope it's a dedicated setting and not some "flashless" mode that I need to set every time I turn it on (listening, Fujifilm? Let us disable the flash completely and permanently!)

That's all for now.
 
tapesonthefloor said:
Just re-watched that hands-on demo.

  1. The flash is stupid. I think the size is poor and the placement is poor. I suppose they need this camera to still be marketable as a complete package for the P&S crowd, but I will turn this flash off on day 1 and never turn it back on. I hope it's a dedicated setting and not some "flashless" mode that I need to set every time I turn it on (listening, Fujifilm? Let us disable the flash completely and permanently!)

That's all for now.
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You can apply tapesontheflash instead of tapesonthefloor to take care of it
 
semilog said:
A lot of verbiage, much of it technically accurate, but in many places missing the point for practical picture taking. I'll leave the rest of it without further comment.

On this point, however, I want to say something further.

Sensors exhibit very substantial sample variation. Like many other electronic components, sensors are binned by quality. Grade 0 sensors used in scientific and technical imaging have essentially no defects (e.g., hot and cold pixels) beyond a stringent threshold. Rather boring scientific monochrome cameras with grade 0 sensors (say, a 1.4 megapixel front-illuminated microlensed interline transfer Sony) are generally in excess of $8000, and often sell for $15000 or more.

Sensors of that bin quality will not be found in mass-produced pro/consumer cameras. These devices will therefore exhibit subsstantial sample-to-sample variation.

A RAW file contains no data that describes the pixel-level defect profile of a specific sensor, and cannot compensate for this variation. An in-camera JPEG engine can easily store and utilise such an individual profile. In fact, in scientific imaging, for critical applications, we always profile the individual sensor, even though it's generally grade 0.

And that is why a good in-camera JPEG engine can, in principle, in some applications, trump the RAW developer on your computer.
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To agree and add a bit to Semilog's text. It's rare that a die yield is perfect. The best ones cost the most. The others are patched with firmware. This applies to the fast processor in your computer and to the sensor in the best camera, and a world of stuff in-between. read the following papers, then argue..

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~maly/yield/Ref.html

http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?NewsID=14107

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/free...rNumber=802865&isnumber=17398&arnumber=802865


pkr
 
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fdigital said:
Lol. You guys are nuts. You spend thousands and thousands of dollars on camera gear and lenses to get the ultimate shooting equipment you can, and than you allow your cameras processing chip to "bake" your files to however the software engineers hastily chose to tune it, remove all the excess data so that if you don't like the way it's rendered a color or a tone, you can't change it anyway.

If I shot JPEG files I wouldn't have work. Simple as that. They wouldn't hold up to what I have to do to get them how the clients want them. And it's nothing drastic, just dodging/burning and highlight recovery through some pretty advanced methods. You'd never know by looking at the end file, but a lot of work goes into them. JPEGS fall apart when you look at them wrong. Not only that, they're actually no easier or quicker to work with - RAW is just as easy and quick.

Just think about this: for every shoot I do I can tune each colors luminance, saturation and hue exactly how I want them, I can tint shadows and highlights certain hues, and I can pull back about 1.4-2 stops of highlights if need be, and push about 3-4 stops of shadows without excess noise. Why wouldn't I want that extra control for no extra effort? People spend hours researching noise performance and dynamic range of cameras and digital sensors but they're willing to forego the potential for significantly better and more tunable output by using a pre-baked jpeg file - Blows my mind!

It's kind of like eating microwaved dinners every night. Sure it works and you can live off it and it's a little easier, but I'll cook my own food using my own ingredients thanks.
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I would say that your "Raw" file isn't as raw as you might think. The image processor in your camera is correcting for defects in the camera sensor. While the converter in LR is likely one of the best, many high end cameras produce good jpg files.. not as good as with LR.. but quite usable. I too chose to output Raw in most cases and convert with LR. But, many of the processing engines in the better cameras are very good and will get better. Defects in the sensor at a low level are corrected by the camera's firmware. Each sensor has both common and it's unique errors and defects.
 
semilog said:
A question to the folks who know about JPEG as a technical standard.

I may be wrong about this (and PLEASE correct me if I am), but I know that RAW schemes and DNG use a linear encoding of sensor data which distribute relatively more digitisation bits for high illuminances and sparser digitisation for shadow values. Is it the case that JPEG can use a logarithmic encoding so that similar numbers of bits encode, say, Zone II/III and Zone VII/VIII?
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The JPEG standard has over 32 (from memory, book somewhere at work) different schemes, most of them are proprietary. So everyone goes after the "royalty-free" baseline implementation. I am not sure if any use LOG scale as part of their standard scheme, but will look at it.

There is no reason why a camera can't convert to LOG or other scale, and then run the image through the JPEG scheme. A pre-processor and post-processor would have to be used. There are journal articles on people using LOG conversions with JPEG-2000.

Just a QUICK SEARCH.

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MCG.2005.133
 
Paul T. said:
I didn't notice this post before. It's not really true. jpeg images lose quality every time they are opened, edited and saved. If you convert it to tiff, then always work on the tiff file, that eliminates the problem, but that eliminates the time/space saving of working with jpeg in the first place.

I personally save all my GF1 images as jpegs because my Photoshop's stopped working. But i recognise there's a sacrifice involved.

With film emulation modes, can you revert to a 'neutral' file?
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JPEG allows for lossless compression: entropy is retained. The space savings is from use of Huffman encoding, but all of the frequency components are preserved. Typically a compression factor of 2 or 3 is attained. Same with JPEG-2000, an entropy-retaining mode is available.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
JPEG allows for lossless compression: entropy is retained. The space savings is from use of Huffman encoding, but all of the frequency components are preserved. Typically a compression factor of 2 or 3 is attained. Same with JPEG-2000, an entropy-retaining mode is available.
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This is intersting. The Pentax K10D dSLR offers the option of a very high quality jpeg file that I understand is essentially an uncompressed file (can anyone confirm?). Certainly the file size for the jpeg is typically almost as big as the PEF RAW file.

But there is no reason why the X100 should not offer multiple options: save only jpg, only RAW or both. And for jpg, several different image sizes and quality levels.

When using the Pentax I typically save in RAW + jpg, with the jpeg as a 2MP file (1824 x 1216) at the highest quality setting, just to give me a file that is good enough for reference and internet display, while I treat the RAW file as my "digital negative".
 
I guess no one noticed that Fuji has posted Part 1 of "The Story".

4 blades leaf-like shutter "capable of high-speed flash synchronisation".
Yes Yes and Yes :)
 
kosmo said:
I guess no one noticed that Fuji has posted Part 1 of "The Story".

4 blades leaf-like shutter "capable of high-speed flash synchronisation".
Yes Yes and Yes :)
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Very interesting, yet it leaves some questions unanswered:
  1. How come this special leaf shutter can reach 1/4000s max. shutter speed? When the Hexar AF was introduced, the lenses f2.0 speed served as explanation why it was impossible to get any faster than 1/250s. Granted, due to the shorter focal length, the X100 shutter's opening can be somewhat smaller than that of the Hexar AF, but nevertheless, there must be a little more to it.
  2. When loking at the detail picture of the shutter, it appears that the shutter consists of two pairs of blades that operate with a 90 degree angular offset - this looks a lot different from what I've learnt how a normal leaf shutter operates. Can anyone explain how and why such a shutter would be superior to a traditional leaf shutter design?
Link to the X100 site with chapter 1 of the design story.
 
Arjay said:
Very interesting, yet it leaves some questions unanswered:
  1. How come this special leaf shutter can reach 1/4000s max. shutter speed? [...]
  2. When loking at the detail picture of the shutter, it appears that the shutter consists of two pairs of blades that operate with a 90 degree angular offset - this looks a lot different from what I've learnt how a normal leaf shutter operates. Can anyone explain how and why such a shutter would be superior to a traditional leaf shutter design?
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My guess is that it's actually closer to a standard shutter in that it doesn't properly open and close like a classic leaf shutter, but has pairs of curtains following each other across the light beam, as in focal-plane shutters. If the position is right, you get the best of both worlds: fast speeds, but high flash sync (as you are not shuttering in the image plane)...

Just guessing, though...
 
kossi008 said:
[/list]My guess is that it's actually closer to a standard shutter in that it doesn't properly open and close like a classic leaf shutter, but has pairs of curtains following each other across the light beam, as in focal-plane shutters. If the position is right, you get the best of both worlds: fast speeds, but high flash sync (as you are not shuttering in the image plane)...

Just guessing, though...
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I said "leaf-like", sorry for that. Fuji describes it as "lens shutter". I think that the published picture of the blades says all.
 
Arjay said:
Actually, the picture doesn't describe how the blades are moving and in what sequence. Can you enlighten us?
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No need to be rude. I don't know the exact trajectory of the blades.
What matters to me is that X100 doesn't use focal plane shutter, but lens based one.
 
When I first read about the 4 bladed shutter, I was thinking 4 bladed aperture, like my PEN EE2. Anyways, does a non-circular shutter, like a 4 blade, vertical or horizontal, etc. have an effect on bokeh?
 
kosmo said:
No need to be rude.
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Apologies, no insult intended. I wasn't aware that my comment could be considered rude (English is not my native language).

jsrockit said:
What is your fear about the design of the camera's shutter?
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I'm just curious - this would be the fastest 'leaf' shutter I have ever heard of. Can anyone name me another camera/lens w/ leaf shutter that even comes close in terms of shutter speed? I thought it is close to impossible to reach 1/1000s or faster using a leaf shutter.

ampguy said:
When I first read about the 4 bladed shutter, I was thinking 4 bladed aperture, like my PEN EE2. Anyways, does a non-circular shutter, like a 4 blade, vertical or horizontal, etc. have an effect on bokeh?
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It would if the camera were to use just four aperture blades.

I looked at the new 'Story' part of the X100 website, where they added a new section about the design & rationale of the X100's lens & shutter design. The illustration in this piece shows quite clearly that shutter and aperture assy. are two distinctly separate units, with the diaphragm using 9 blades. I therefore do not expect any influence of the shutter on bokeh.
 
Arjay said:
I'm just curious - this would be the fastest 'leaf' shutter I have ever heard of. Can anyone name me another camera/lens w/ leaf shutter that even comes close in terms of shutter speed? I thought it is close to impossible to reach 1/1000s or faster using a leaf shutter.
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Leica X1 ... 1/2000th.
 
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