Fujifilm has been giving lots of interviews lately and here is yet another one from CP+2019 after the one posted the other day. This interview is full of technical details that you can read into and image resource got lost talking about PDAF a few times so you might want to read their interview if my excerpts aren’t clear enough. Also, Fujifilm provided IR with some slides about their PDAF system that I have reproduced. Below are excerpts from the interview that cover all of the key details:
- Canon believes that the camera market will contract by half, over the next two years, but Fujifilm believes it could grow given the right innovations.
- The Asian market is huge so some markets might grow a lot while others contract, especially China where many don’t own a digital camera yet.
- Fujifilm thinks that full-frame is probably one-third of the market by value.
- “Two-thirds of the market is non-full frame, which is predominantly APS-C, Micro Four Thirds, and some medium-format as well.”
- Fujifilm sees this fact as an opportunity to grow their APS-C and Medium format camera base
- Their recent financial results show around 10% growth for them in the camera market.
- They attribute this growth to the Fujifilm X-T3 and Fujifilm GFX50R
- Fujifilm X-T3 sold better than expected
- It even sold 40% better than the very popular X-T2 during the same period
- Fujifilm isn’t convinced that most customers pick a system on sensor size alone
- The Fujifilm X-T3 was designed from the beginning to drive the starting price down $200
- The Fujifilm X-T3 and X-H1 cannibalize each other’s sales a little, but they repriced the X-H1 so it made sense again
- The X-H line will continue on and it is not just about IBIS, but also form factor.
- The X-T will continue being compact with dials, but the X-H lets them get a little bulky and add things like the top LCD
- The Fujinon XF200 f/2 isn’t just for sports and they do not want to market it that way
- The Fujinon XF200 f/2 is great for portraiture, concerts and more
- Fujifilm wants to have a presence at the 2020 Olympics, but they mention video is just as important as photography at the event.
- They want to support photographers and videographers and broadcasters.
- The Fujifilm GFX 50R is selling better than expected and the Sendai factory is very busy
- The Fujifilm GFX100Mpx is almost final hardware, but the firmware is still very early and IBIS isn’t even working yet.
- The IBIS system is proving to be very challenging
- Photokina 2018 just had a mockup
- They are still working on image quality
- We should see Fujifilm GFX100Mpx before the end of June/first half of 2019
- Now they are saying around $10k
- The Fujinon GF32-64mmF4 is popular with the GFX50S
- The Fujinon GF45mmF2.8 is popular with the GFX50R
- Street photographers are into the GFX50R
- GFX50S owners tend to have more lenses than GFX50R owners
- Fujinon GF45-100mmF4 coming in 2020
- They are considering GFX lenses with faster apertures in the future
- Fujifilm tries to make lenses for everyone, but some requests like an XF100mm f/1.1 would be very expensive
- We can expect to see XF AF speed in future GF lenses
- The GFX100Mpx has the same kind of sensor design as the X-T3 with copper wiring that makes for higher readout speeds and lower power consumption.
- The GFX100Mpx also has similar phase-detection pixel coverage and structure as the X-T3 for it’s PDAF pixels
- The sensor in the GFX100Mpx is a huge leap over the GFX50
- The Fujifilm X-T30 already has the improved AF software that will be coming to the X-T3 soon.
- Picking horizontal or vertical PDAF pixels is easiest with CMOS sensors, but vertical are used the most so it is pretty much the standard with mirrorless cameras.
- They could do a cross type like Olympus if they felt it was needed
- The resolution of the vertical PDAF is good enough that you don’t really need cross type, plus you can just tilt the camera a little and it will track like a cross type if necessary.
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- Fujifilm’s latest on-sensor phase-detect system is unusually flexible, containing both very closely-spaced focus pixels as well as one spaced further apart. Their AF system uses all the AF pixels to perform phase-detect calculations for six different spatial frequencies simultaneously, so it can handle both extremely fine detail as well as low-contrast and low-light subjects.
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- The X-T3’s on-chip phase-detect AF system increased the amount of AF information by a factor of four over their previous technology. There are twice as many focus pixels, and it now performs the PDAF calculations for six vs three different spatial frequencies.
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- Besides now looking at six different spatial frequencies vs three, the sensor in the X-T3 can also “bin” or combine data from focus pixels on each row, significantly improving low-light performance.
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- Fujifilm has been working hard on autofocus, with dramatic improvements in AF success rate in a variety of scenarios. Their latest tech has very closely-spaced pairs of AF pixels, which lets them distinguish very fine detail, something I think may be unique to their systems
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- Phase-detection autofocus pixel and RGB color filter array layout of an X-Trans CMOS 4 image sensor. The ZA and ZB pixels shown each form one half of a phase-detection AF pair.
- There is some vertical sensitivity already from their sensor design
- CMOS sensors read the entire scene before making adjustments
- Their current sensor can read signal and phase pixel separately
- This is good for video because they can optimize the signal level for the phase-detect pixels without affecting the exposure of the image pixels
- Over two million out of 26 million are now used for PDAF
- The amount of PDAF pixels is why low light AF is getting better and is why high-frequency subjects like textures focus better now
- X-T3 AF has twice as many PDAF pixels as the X-T2 and it processes them with twice as much spatial frequencies
- The X-T3 is dealing with about 4 times as much PDAF data as the X-T2
- Since they read all the data before making adjustments they could make it do cross type
- Their AF is basically limited by their algorithm and processing power, but right now it’s more limited by processing power.
- ZA/ZB pairs are close horizontally, but not vertically so AF resolution would not be equal
- Vertical AF correlation hasn’t really been a need yet also
- Fujifilm can also bin their PDAF pixel data to read better in low light
- Fujifilm doesn’t really think anyone has a competing camera to go up against the Fujifilm GFX100Mpx
- Fujifilm isn’t sure they want to do a multi-shot high-res mode because moving the huge sensor isn’t very easy
- Not sure how many stops of IBIS performance they can get with the GFX100Mpx
- Fujifilm GFX and X are being developed together because they do not separate their teams
- So their hardware and software is developed across systems
- Both teams also have one budget
- Fujifilm’s team will make more GF or more X lenses based on customer feedback
- When designing XF lenses the challenge is making the lens small
- When designing GF lenses the challenge is aberrations
- Lenses like the XF33mm f/1.0 are a different kind of challenge to design
- Fujifilm designs their lenses to have a super sharp point when focusing and not to just have a generally sharp area like others, which is one of the advantages of mirrorless.
- DSLR need a general focus region because they aren’t as accurate at AF
- Easier to make contract detect AF lenses work with PDAF than PDAF lenses work with contrast detect
via imaging-resource
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