Fujifilm Q&A: COVID impact, GFX strategy, shrinking IBIS, secrets of a 300,000-cycle shutter and more
by Dave Etchells posted Friday, September 4, 2020 at 9:00 AM EDT
This is the third in a series of interviews I conducted while in Japan in early March of this year, a trip I barely managed to sneak in before the Coronavirus travel restrictions. Between the COVID situation, the sale of IR,…
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Quote:
”Hi,
I wanted to share this interview with top Fuji managers such as Toshi Iida, Shinichiro Udono and Jun Watanabe published by
Imaging-resource, which may interest some GFX users.
Here is an interesting excerpt, which may hint at Fuji's future GFX solutions:
Dave Etchells: Yeah, yeah. Handheld 100-megapixel is definitely important. Normally you really have to have the camera on a tripod or be shooting with fast strobes to take full advantage of 100 megapixels. So what do you think people are asking for next? Even smaller than 50R, or...
Shin Udono: Always, always smaller, cheaper, or better ease of use. It's always challenging, but if you look at the X-T4 versus X-H1, that shows what can be achieved in several years.
If you don't have the time/will to read trough the article, here is the summary for the GFX section of the interview, provided by FujiRumors. (You can read trough the rest of the summary
here.)
GFX Triumph and Strategy
- top full frame cameras are priced around $3,000-5,000. Fujifilm targets those customers to expand customer base
- at that price point, people can choose full frame or upgrade to medium format GFX
- as flange distance is different, XF lenses can’t be adapted to GFX cameras
- you can adapt DSLR lenses to Fujifilm GFX with smart autofocus adapters
- 70-80% of GFX customers were coming from non-Fuji cameras. Most probably from full frame DSLR cameras
- GFX 50R targets street photographers. GFX 100 is more serious or professional photographers: Fashion, commercial, fashion portrait…
- high requests for GFX cameras also among museums and libraries for archival purpose
- Fujifilm GFX100 is currently the best selling GFX camera. GFX50R is close to GFX100 sales. GFX50S sees half the sales of GFX50R.
- GFX sells 50% better than they predicted
- GFX lens attachment rate: about 3 lenses per 1 GFX camera
- Fujifilm X system has a lower lens attachment rate than GFX system
- GFX system is really good business for Fujifilm
- the medium format look is striking to full-frame customers: 3D-feel, higher resolution, dynamic range, lenses than can resolve 100MP
- GFX is best for image quality
- size, weight, price… Fujifilm is looking on how to make medium-format attractive and realistic as a choice for customers
- the success with the GFX50R was its smaller size
- But with GFX100 Fujifilm wanted to make the perfect GFX camera, hence put IBIS into it for best usability, which made the camera bigger
- for GFX100 users portability is not as important as usability (for example handheld 100MP shooting thanks to IBIS)
- for the future, GFX has to become smaller and cheaper
Cheers.”
