Fuji X Half – Stupid or brilliant?

There’s been a lot of heated discussions about Fujifilm’s latest camera on social media in the past few days. This camera is small, cute, has a tiny 1” sensor, cannot shoot RAW, and it costs around $850. And for some reason people have very strong feelings about it.

I don’t really like the look of the photos from this camera. They look oversharpened (in a bad way), and they have the vibe of smartphone cameras from 10-15 years ago. Furthermore, the filters you can apply in the camera (light leak, grain etc.) are awkwardly implemented.

It feels like Fujifilm had a team of great engineers make this camera, but nobody with a sense of what makes a beautiful photograph. For $850 I would probably never buy it. However, I would gladly pay even more than that if they had made some different decisions regarding the software. Let me explain.

What I find interesting about the Fuji X Half, is something nobody seems to be talking about. A feature that has been missing for too long in digital cameras: in-camera filters that go beyond Fuji film simulations.

Film simulations is a great idea popularized by Fujifilm, but they only adjust the colors of the photo. They don’t add grain, light leak effects, borders, or other heavier forms of editing. These kinds of heavier effects are present in the new Fuji X Half camera.

The only problem is that the effects are badly implemented. They simply don’t look aesthetically pleasing.

Do you remember when Instagram started growing like crazy back in 2012 or so? The monumental success of Instagram was likely in part thanks to the invention of the “like button”, a concept with tremendous viral power. But just as much of the success I would attribute to the awesome filters that were included.

The filters and borders in the original Instagram app made the dull photos from early smartphone cameras look amazing. They were extremely well crafted filters. Someone on the Instagram team obviously had a great sense of aesthetics and color grading, and what goes into a beautiful photograph. Sadly, the Fujifilm X Half team doesn’t seem to have had such a person on board.

Imagine if the Fuji X Half camera had better crafted filters, that actually made the photos look good. Imagine if they even opened up the format so that anyone could make their own filters for the camera. Imagine if the camera could load Lightroom presets that would be applied instantly in-camera?

They could have an “app store” for filters, a “filter store” – people could craft their own filters and either provide them for free or sell them. Fuji could have a marketplace for filters, and could take a cut of all the sales. It could be a great new income stream for the company, in times where it is hard to get by only selling cameras and lenses. And it could have lifted this new Fuji X Half camera from a gimmick into something much bigger.

With better implemented filters that actually would make the photos look great, I would have bought this camera. Hell, I would have paid even more for it than the high price they charge today.

But I have hope for the future. Perhaps somebody will go all the way one day, and implement beautiful filters in a camera, together with a “filter store”. I will be there to buy that camera, even if it would be severily overpriced from a hardware perspective.

The closest thing I’ve seen except the Fuji X Half is a kickstarter project I backed a while back – the pixless camera. “Shitty” and “overpriced” hardware (0.03 megapixels), but beautiful, aesthetically pleasing results and probably a lot of fun. I haven’t received my copy yet, but I am eagerly looking forward to it.