I find it very strange that lack of capabilities is becoming a selling point for cameras these days. The marketing term is “simple” (look at Sigma BF), which somehow removes these cameras from the pressure of being compared to their peers in terms of capabilities.
But if you really want “simple” in this sense, lot of other older cameras can do it. One can get a Nikon 1, a Samsung NX, or an older micro 4/3 like any Panasonic GF, forget about half the controls, and just take pictures.
I think that instead, the appeal of the Fuji X-Half is not having to think about developing RAW photos. You dial in the “look” you want, and then just enjoy the results. And the default look is already great for 99% of the purposes. You can share that on social media instantly. When asked about your camera sensor’s bit depth or dynamic range or noise, you can just shrug and say that you don’t know and don’t care.
RAW development can be daunting for people just getting into photography, to the extent that it sucks all joy out of it and distracts from other, more important topics like composition or understanding depth of field. The current trends are about this, “simple” is just a marketing term. The Panasonic S9 is a totally diffent concept from the the Fuji X-Half, but at its heart is also about the same thing: dial in your look with LUTs and ignore the technicalities.
I also believe that it doesn’t really help that most camera JPEG engines are pretty poor when it comes to interesting and balanced outputs. I understand a few sane default looks, but beyond that it would be good to give users the choice for more risky, “artistic”, or well thought out (Ektar 100, C200, etc), looks. Kodak and Fujifilm poured millions, maybe billions, into their film stocks and color science, to not only look accurate but also very pleasing to the majority of people, and it seems like we don’t see that reflected in both dedicated cameras and also smartphone’s output. The target is just a 1:1 representation of reality.
In my distant youth, I directed a play called “The Leader”, by Eugene Ionesco. The majority of the play consists of cultists trying to convince a couple of the brilliance of the leader. The leader only appears at the end of the play, at which point the couple say, “But he hasn’t got a head!”, to which the cultists say, “Why does he need a head, when he has got genius”.
As Parr ever taken a bad photograph? I am sure that he has, I am equally sure that he has, as far as possible, kept these out of public view.
There is a quotation from an interview with Ralph Vaughan Williams towards the end of his life, in which he confesses that he has always struggled against amateurish technique (Unfortunately, I can’t find it online).
I am afraid I find the Tillmans pictures amateurish, with little artistic merit. I see them as the forerunners of Instagram and TikTok. Sturgeon’s Law comes to mind when I look at them.
Yeah, I’m obv not saying Parr is a bad photographer. I own some books and have been to his shows. Just i also accept that he frequently deals in the grotesque and to pretend otherwise is silly. The doco was quite funny at one point, with a voiceover claiming that Parr was just capturing “life as it is”, as the footage shows him roaming yet more garish seaside arcades and union flag festooned street coronation parties. Yeah, that’s the real life that he repeatedly photographs.
Tillmans is a mood more than a photographer, I suppose, though he can produce more obviously technically polished work.
Comparing Tom Wood and Martin Parr’s pics of New Brighton (Parr’s gathered in his breakthrough Last Resort book) is interesting:
It’s frankly refreshing to read this take! Most of the photographic community seems to be up in arms about the lack of raw support, IBIS, and all the buttons and dials.
But Fujifilm, with its INSTAX experience, seems very good at reading the room. Perhaps a return to simplicity is something that would suit us as well, mired as we are in the complexities and technicalities of optimal capture and raw development.
Now, the X-Half does not trigger my GAS in the slightest. But it does make me wonder if that might not be a fault on my part; that I forgot what photography was supposed to be all about. Or merely that I’m too set in my ways.
People have different preferences. If you like minimal road bikes, then it is fine that you may not be interested in a city cargo bike. Not everyone has to like every camera, even when they are photographers.
The X-Half hardware would trigger my GAS in an instant. I think that the 1" sensor size is great and enough for 99% of daylight photography. It has an aperture ring and and exposure compensation dial and I can work fine with those.
It is the interface that I consider crippled. I would either want RAWs to edit, or have the camera apply exposure compensation on demand and maybe a simulated simple GND horizontal filter which I can move around with my finger, before the Fuji color magic. That is really all the editing I need, after that I am good with JPG.
I had the RX100 III for a while when it came out and liked it for what it was. Fast lens (w. some corner issues), EVF!, flip-up screen and surprisingly decent IQ from that sensor; more than good enough for some larger prints, especially with the advances in editing software ((AI) de-noise, upscaling, …) .
PS: after a couple thousand shots from the last 5+ weeks in Istanbul I’m still more than happy with my current, still relatively compact setup (E-M1, 12-32 Lumix, 50/1.8 MF Zuiko) and don’t miss anything else except maybe an extra stop or two of dynamic range (DXO: 12.7) but then something like the RX100 is even more compact and can be carried around in a tiny belt case. I’ll probably pick up another RX100 III as a backup camera once I get back home after this trip.
Surveys obv only indicate stated rather than revealed preferences. But maybe there’s a market for people who want to escape the online world but aren’t going to get into the weeds of ‘RAW editing as hobby’.
Many years ago as a student (in the 1990s) and before I had started taking photography seriously, I was in a second-hand book store and found a book called “Boring Postcards”. It showed lots of really boring photos of intersections, petrol stations and the kind of thing that no one ever takes photos of. Because I was an edgy student, I thought it was as funny as it was fascinating, and I proudly owned it for many years. Then I got rid of it when I moved house.
It was only recently that I realized how the “boring” look was trendy again and really regretted getting rid of the book. But more incredibly, I hadn’t realized that the author of the book was Martin Parr who it turned out was very famous. For all those years of owning it, I had just thought it was a humorous collection of boring photos that would otherwise had been forgotten in someone’s attic. Turns out that I wasn’t very edgy at all for finding this book in a second-hand book store and thinking I was ahead of the times in terms of trends.
Bought in a charity shop earlier this year. Maybe it’s yours. I also had no idea it was from Martin Parr’s collection of crap postcards. Just saw that at the back of the book now.
Just skimmed through the grumpy comments under the dpreview article on the Fuji Half. If ever you needed a demonstration of why those obsessed with technical specs are useless at product development and marketing, it’s all there.
The dpreview forums can be crazy occasionally. Some people are nice, but sometimes people start spewing clueless opinions very aggressively. There is a prevalent mindset that photography is about gear specs.
Generally people on this forum are orders of magnitude more civil and knowledgeable.
Completely agree. No comparison to here. Also a lot of the posters there have this weird authoritarianism over what people decide to spend their own money on… it’s like a lump of consumer fallacy or something.
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