This means one thing: Fujifilm keeps digging into what the Fuji CEO called their new goldmine, the photography business and especially their Instax business.
The brown camera you see in the image above shows the Fujifilm X100F brown edition. The image just serves as a reference on how I’d expect the new color to look like.
I was with my Fujifilm X-T5 and the XF18-135mm because I wanted to take landscape images, but also images of the marmots who just came out from their hibernation (as you can also see in this video).
The X-S20 Would Have Done Better (than X-T5)
So I set my X-T5 to animal tracking because of the marmots.
But then I notice an alpine chough on a rock nearby ready to jump into flight.
I wanted to track the “take-off”, but first I had to press an FN button, then scroll down to bird detection, press to confirm, go back in live view and then… the bird had already taken off.
My first thought?
“If only I’d have had the smartness of the (more affordable) Fujifilm X-S20, I would not have missed this shot“
Why?
Because the Fujifilm X-S20 recognizes and tracks all sorts of subjects automatically, without any need to press a single button and go into the menu and tell the camera what it has to track.
That’s a level of smartness my X-T5, but not even the X-H2 or X-H2S has.
I can hear some say: “but it’s just a few presses on the buttons to change subject“. And that’s true. In most cases, you will have enough time to change the settings. But in my case, it all happened quickly, faster than I could react.
It Works So Great, but with One Big Missed Opportunity
If you couldn’t care less about this feature, that’s great.
We are all different, and you are probably just seeing and reacting to things faster than I do.
But the point is that Fujifilm has this technology available. It’s there on the X-S20 and it works very well according to those who tested it such as Gordon from Cameralabs, who says:
Auto Subject Detection does a great job to automatically recognize subjects. You don’t need to manually select the type of subject anymore.
Although there is a limitation, which would be completely avoidable if Fujifilm would provide a firmware update for it. In fact, Gordon rightfully remarks*: *the full review of Gordon can be found down below
Sadly Auto subject detect does not work, unless you are in the full AUTO mode, which is a missed opportunity. Workaround: switch quickly to AUTO if you want the camera to track automatically (but then you’ll also get Auto Dynamic Range, which can work well but sometimes give a too HDR like look.
This is a limitation that Fujifilm could fix with a quick firmware update by not linking auto detection to the full Auto mode.
Also, I do hope that Fujifilm will bring this feature (not the full AUTO feature, but the automatic subject tracking feature) also to the more expensive 5th generation Fujifilm X-T5, X-H2 and X-H2s.
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