Bonsai123 Loc: Puerto Rico

Fujifilm jpgs

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Urnst Loc: Brownsville, Texas

Thanks for your advice.

MDI Mainer

Most if not all of today's cameras have settings to tweak the JPEG output to suit your personal preferences:

https://bythom.com/technique/taking-photos-techniques/you-want-great-jpegs-heres.html

User ID

They are the same ... until you twiddle all the artsy fartsy dials. Fuji dials have more choices, if you dig that stuff.

Olympus cameras are smaller. Maybe thaz why they couldn’t cram all those film and painting simulations into them. One of our “UHH experts” will esplain you about that.

MDI Mainer

"They are the same . . ."

This is just false.

User ID

They are the same, as stated, until you dial up the artsy stuff.

My buddy shoots mixed Fuji and APSC SLR on some jobs. You can’t tell which jpg is from which body by the results. I can easily guess some of them but only because certain shots would require the silent Fuji camera ;-)

Acoarst you could always go to pixel level to detect the Fuji X-Tran pattern from the Bayer array ....

User ID

All cats are grey at f:8.

Whether lens quality differences actually show up depends on whether shooting circumstances call for settings that will either exaggerate or will minimize those differences. Also, the look of jpg images is far more dependent of processing than on optics.

Dial in your fave jpg image style, and acoarst watch your technical P’s and Q’s, and you’ll get what you expect, jpgwise, from almost any two cameras or lenses you choose to compare.

Were you to intentionally take optical differences to extremes then you would likely see some visual differences. But differences don’t necessarily mean that there’s a winner and a loser ;-)

I have about a dozen 85 and 90mm lenses. All different. All keepers. But to an ultimate IQ geek, it’s not about the “keepers”, it’s about the “winner”.

MDI Mainer

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the clearly pejorative term "artsy stuff." I suspect you are referring to the application by the photographer of brand-specific in camera effects to an image, e.g. "oil painting" or "poster."

But it is simply false and misleading to say that different camera brands produce straight out of the camera JPEG images that "are the same." Perhaps you cannot discern the difference, or have too limited an experience in comparing different brands, but others do not share your conclusion. I will concede that the determination of which brand is "best" is somewhat subjective. But they are different to a reasonably perceptive eye.

https://petapixel.com/2016/11/16/great-jpeg-shootout-brand-best-straight-camera/

le boecere

I very much like the way you wrote this.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Each manufacturer tunes their "secret JPEG sauce" differently. This first became apparent to me during the transition from film to digital capture in the school portraiture business. As I had just come from lab management into a training content development role, I was tasked with matching Nikon color and Canon color to Kodak Portra 160NC color. The good news is, we came very close to a match. The interesting news is, we used very different menu settings on the cameras to do so.

Out of the box, the (then) Nikon D70 didn't match the Nikon D100 at all! Neither matched the Canon EOS 20D or 5D, either. But the 20D and 5D did match each other well, and they were not too far off the look of long roll Portra 160NC film run through our C41 cine processors and scanned on Bremson HR500+ scanners.

Most of the time, the Canons of any given model matched each other quite well. Occasionally, though, we got one that was shipped "out of spec." That was true of the Nikons as well.

Around, 2002 or 2003, the Fujifilm technical service reps kept trying to get us to use their cameras. They sent me a couple of the same model to test. One was 20 points green, 6 points blue, and the other was 17 points red, two points green. Ick!

Fortunately, in a few years' time, Fujifilm got its act together. Their cameras now make some of the nicest JPEGs available.

User ID

Waaaaay too analytical for a nonissue.

MDI Mainer

My first digital camera, which I got in about 2001, was a Fuji. I got it for my first trip to my now home state of Maine.

I lucked out, since I remember the JPEGs were quite stunning overall. I got a Fuji, probably somewhat naively, since I preferred the color rendition of the Fuji transparency films I had used previously.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I always liked Fujifilm film. Neopan SS was a favorite back in the 1970s. Velvia 50 and Provia 100 were always on my list of great slide film options. Their professional portrait films were in the same league as Kodak's. I encountered nearly all C41 films in the portrait lab I worked for.

The first Fujifilm S2 SLRs I encountered really did not impress me. I was running the digital side of our school portrait lab in the early 2000s. Some of our customers and (newly acquired) retail employee photographers were using them.

My color correction staff always complained about those early Fujifilm images compared to Nikon and Canon images of that same time. So I borrowed an S2 and ran controlled tests in my studio. I could not match what the other brands were doing. We switched our retail photographers to Canon in the next capital budget year.

In early 2004, Fujifilm gave me two S20 Pro cameras to test. These were introduced at the PMAI trade show a few weeks earlier, where I had seen them. They were supposed to be Fujifilm's "professional school portrait cameras." They looked like amateur point-and-shoot cameras to me. But the samples displayed on the trade show floor looked good, so I accepted the loaners to test.

I ran controlled tests with a human model and various test charts in the studio, using the camera settings they provided, and could not make either of them produce good output — or match each other. In fact, both of them were terrible... They even had Manual White Balance options, but could not be made to match each other, or reality.

Fujifilm sent their technical service rep in with the sales guy, and a VP, and we repeated the tests with them in the room, observing the methods. We walked downstairs, tried to adjust the images in our color correction department, and printed the best of the results. All three were dumbfounded. We gave their cameras back to them and they left. They never again mentioned cameras to us. By the time they could have, our business had been sold to Lifetouch (2011). They used Nikons and their own proprietary cameras.

We saw the Fujifilm folks every year... They wanted our paper and chemistry business. We were a Kodak lab for decades, using truckloads of photo paper every year, and tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals to print millions of portrait packages. So they kept talking. They helped us keep Kodak honest!

That was then... But in the early 2010s, things changed dramatically. The X-Pro1 was a breakthrough, at least after several firmware updates. It was the first of the X-series cameras to really nail quality to the wall and say, "LOOK AT THIS!!!"

Followed by the XT series and some really great glass, the Fujifilm mirrorless lineup grew steadily. The latest X-Pro3, and especially the XT-4, are worthy of anyone's consideration within their categories.

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

I've written here before that a number of years ago (10 or so), I volunteered at the Dallas Arboretum. I was among the guests, and was doing jobs that allowed and encouraged me to interact and converse with them. I was also close enough to them that I could clearly see what cameras they were using. At that time, there were fewer manufacturers that mattered and not nearly as many cameras models in circulation, so keeping track of what folks were using really boiled down to what brand of camera they were using, which was pretty easy, since there were really only two viable choices.

I learned that people with "serious cameras" came to the arboretum for one of two reasons (and it was really just one or the other, rarely both). They either came to photograph the flowers, or they came to photograph people using the flowers as backdrops. Brides, quinceaneras, anniversaries, all sorts of reasons for photographing people. Most formal to at least some degree, some less so.

Anyway, from talking to them, almost none used raw, but the "people group" almost exclusively bought one brand of camera and the "flower group" almost exclusively bought the other brand. It had to do with the differences in the images captured by the CCD sensors in each brand's cameras and the very limited range of adjustments available to customize the capture of those images.

My latest cameras from one of those same two manufacturers provides a wide range of adjustments of six or seven major parameters of image capture. Other adjustments are now enhanced to the point that I can set color balance on two axes, not just one, and I can also adjust tonal value response, meter behavior, and a number of other factors. Note that this IS NOT IN ANY WAY accepting what the camera chooses to do to my images. IT IS making some important choices and directing the camera to respond in a specific way to the light that it sees. With a little care and planning, I can make my cameras respond like each other, respond like the other camera brand's defaults, or respond like my original CCD sensor camera. It is no longer true that I have to buy one camera brand over another to get a specific "look" in my images.

Of course, it is important to understand that the reason I can do this is related to the camera model I chose to buy. A D500 or D810 or D850 offers choices and adjustments that are not available on a D3500 or even on a D750. It offers a range of adjustments that are not available on a D300. I have no idea what adjustments might be available on a D5 or similar camera. And yes, my Fuji S3Pro produced beautiful 6mp images. But I do not recall any particular ability to adjust it to make any other sort of images. I was pretty much stuck with what I got. (Maybe I just didn't know how at that time.) I do know that any of my current cameras can come pretty close to making any lens a soft focus lens. I know they come from the factory set not too far from that point. They also come from the factory with saturation set to an unattractively low level. (You can be sure that's fixed now.)

I've not used a lot of the cameras being mentioned in this discussion. I don't know if they are adjustable or not. If so, I don't know how adjustable they might be. It would be interesting to have that knowledge. But I think it is important to know whether people are basing comments like those being made here on something that is still true, or if it is just holdover information from long ago that simply won't die.

And yes...I post process those images for which it is worth the time and effort to do so. But that is not every one of them. It is not even most of them. To be honest, I've got other things to do with my time. But those images can still be usable for what I intended them. Just takes a little care in setup and shooting.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yes, the concept of "pre-processing" — making exposure, white balance, hue offsets, saturation, sharpness, contrast, dynamic range compensation, "picture style," changes, etc. — has been around for quite some time... at least the early 2000s for Canons and Nikons. Early on, other manufacturers (Fujifilm and a couple others) seemed to have a "pre-set it at the factory and hide the controls" approach, which was insulting. Still others (such as Kodak) had a proprietary raw workflow you almost had to use, because their JPEGs were horrible. (Kodak also had issues with overheating sensors in the original 14n, which caused such an industry uproar that they lost most of their pro camera business credibility.)

All the camera manufacturers making MILCs and dSLRs today have a pretty decent range of adjustments on most of their models, if you can believe the test reports at https://www.dpreview.com (I do).

What really does set the Fujifilm cameras apart is that since they make films, they have the color science to make simulation profiles of their own films and put them in their cameras. When you use those profiles, the JPEGs look pretty darned close to the films they emulate.

Other manufacturers don't spend quite as much time on this. Olympus did some of that with the Pen-F "Art filters," but that model's now discontinued. Canon, Nikon, and Panasonic have always had a good range of different "picture styles", but none is specifically a particular "film look."

Of course, raw workflow opens up a world of possibilities. For example, we can buy profiles to install in Lightroom Classic that simulate dozens to hundreds of different films, both past and present. Those work with virtually any camera supported by the software.