Manager Interview

David Etchells, formerly at Imaging Resource, and always highly respected for his deep technical knowledge, has now shared his talk with Fujifilm managers at the CP+ earlier this year.

As usual, David knows how to dig deep into technical details and make the right questions.

Here on FujiRumors we will provide just a short summary in bullet points for those of you who are in a hurry and want to give it a quick glance. But for the full talk you have to check out the very interesting article at petapixel.

Deep-learning based AF tracking system

• it’s an enormous task to develop it. Tens of thousands of photos of an intended subject must be manually processed by humans
• Fujifilm has to constantly add new elements to the training database to improve AF tracking
• X-H2S firmware 3.0 improved mainly
  – AF tracking with fast moving subjects
  – increased the AF frequency during continuous shooting by making the algorithm more efficient and processing faster (double the AF processing speed of previous firmware)
• they talk how certain AF improvements might come to X-T5 and X-H2 at some point – which then happened on May 24
• Fujifilm might be the first manufacturer, who, with their latest firmware, now tightly couples AI subject recognition with conventional phase-detect-based AF tracking. David says that this is significant because AI subject recognition and conventional AF tracking are two fundamentally different processes. Getting the two to work together in close coordination is a big breakthrough.

Fujifilm X-T5 – 3 millimeters too much ;)

I get many emails from FR-readers with wishes about all possible things regarding the Fujifilm system.

Today I decided to catch up with and share some of those wishes.

This time we don’t share camera related wishes, but only lens, firmware and more, as otherwise there would be simply just too much to cover and discuss at once. An additional wishlist roundup with even more wishes will follow later on.

Wishlist Roundup

Fujifilm seems to be trying to takle the parts shortage more seriously compared to that creative (and failed) solution of using blockchain for that purpose.

Now, down below you can read the google translated version of their plan, which is not 100% clear, but I guess it overall simply means: we’ll get more parts from more suppliers.

On the 6th, Fujifilm announced the goal of expanding the target to a total of 30,000 parts of 30 suppliers by the fiscal year for digital platforms that optimize parts inventories such as digital cameras. We have been conducting verification for 4300 items from 8 companies since October last year, but we have started full-scale operation as we have been able to confirm the cost reduction effect such as inventory management.

Oh well, better late than never I guess.

Let’s hope this will have positive effects also on the Fujifilm X100V, which in Japan is suspended since 8 months and as Fujifilm managers told us recently here, if the entire world would stop to order the Fujifilm X100V today, it would take Fujifilm still up to 3 months to manufacture and ship all the cameras already ordered until up to this point.

And quite frankly, there are plenty of other cameras that could benefit from a more stable parts procurement, maybe there could be even a revival for the Fujifilm X-E4, which was discontinued even though MANY of you had one on order. Fujifilm simply gave up on being ever able to ship it in a reasonable time.

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