![]() ![]() The Thinking Behind the X-Pro2: ‘Quality You Can Sense’ Takashi Ueno, Fujifilm product planner. And the fruit of their labour is the X series that many admire, myself included. It takes an army of people to create a complex product like a digital camera but this team of two is where ideas form, clash and coalesce almost daily. Jun is the quiet thinker to Takashi, who has so much energy that if you could bottle his enthusiasm, you’d easily power half of Tokyo. The camera looks ‘retro’ but Fujifilm’s industrial designer isn’t paying lip service to a trend, as we’ll shortly see. You can confidently shoot in the rain with no ill effects. Even more so with the X-Pro2 because the camera is now weather sealed (you’ll need to pair it with WR, or weather resistant lenses for full water and dust protection). OVF mode and you’re in rangefinder country. ![]() With its hybrid OVF/EVF viewfinder and tactile controls you have the possibility of shooting in a rangefinder-like fashion one moment and switch to a DSLR-like shooting mode in the next with a flick of a lever. The Fujifilm X-Pro2 is arguably the most unique camera currently on the market. This means a very deep understanding of colour. And last but not least, Fujifilm is the only camera maker that also makes film. Third, because Fujifilm is creating cameras for a specific need, their industrial design is well thought out and relevant to the act of photography. Second, they craft cameras that satisfy a real need. Fujifilm not only makes great lenses for their past and present still cameras but they are also leaders in the quality obsessed television and motion picture lens industry. I mention the GX680 III and the GA645 not because I’ve used them, but because they are perfect examples of four aspects that strongly inform Fujifilm’s camera design philosophy. Try that with other medium format cameras. Of course, you could shoot aperture priority or manual but this camera was all about the possibility of shooting what you see and experience without needing to worry about settings - doubly true if you were shooting color negative film with its forgiving latitude. You’re shooting medium format like you’d shoot a compact camera. Uncommonly, it had an accurate Program auto-exposure mode for spur of the moment shooting. It had a fixed Fujinon 60mm f4 lens (37mm equivalent) that was tack sharp, full of contrast and had wonderful color rendition. The GA645 on the other hand was a slender 6 x 4.5 cm medium format shooter especially useful for photography on the go, such as travel photography. It shot a rare 6 x 8 cm image on medium format film, which is close to magazine page proportions in order to minimize cropping. With this combination, you could shoot a small product that was completely in focus, as well as photograph interior and exterior architecture while correcting for converging parallels. This enabled not only close-up shots with any lens but also enabled the front standard to have view camera movements - rise/fall, tilt, shift and swing. The superb Fujinon EBC lenses were attached to a front standard that in turn connected to the camera body with bellows. It’s a very specialized camera catering to product, interior and architectural photography. ![]() The GX680 III is the largest SLR ever made. For example, I have in the past used two remarkable Fujifilm cameras - the GX680 III and the GA645. If you take a look at Fujifilm’s history of cameras, you get a sense of a company that sees photography not only as a technological endeavor but also an artistic one. For the X-Pro2, Fujifilm chose the latter simply because of their heritage of crafting cameras for particular needs. Or you can specialize and excel in specific areas-a more difficult proposition altogether. For example, you can create a spreadsheet listing current and near-future ‘must-have’ specifications and cross them out one-by-one to please the techno-consumer. ![]()
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