In today's episode, will Canon and Ricoh make vintage cameras? What will an eventual X-Pro4 be and is the Apple M4 Max Mac Studio all the computer you need?
You can find the show notes here.
You can find the show notes here.
Show Notes
Welcome back to the Liam Photography Podcast! I’m your host, Liam Douglas, and this is Episode 445. In today’s episode, we’ll look at what Fujifilm’s plans are for an X-Pro successor, why Canon and Ricoh are not interested in vintage cameras and is the Apple M4 MAX studio computer all a photographer needs? Let’s get started!
Speaking to PetaPixel last week at the CP+ show in Japan, Fujifilm says it is aware of the demands for an X-Pro series successor but wants to make sure that what it produces isn’t just a small, “boring” upgrade.
It has been almost six years since the Fujifilm X-Pro3 was announced and many fans of the system have been wondering for some time when the next iteration of the popular rangefinder-style camera will be released. It has been so long that some believe Fujifilm has abandoned the line, but the company says that’s not true — the company promises a new X-Pro will come at some point.
“We haven’t abandoned the line so it will come one day, but we need something which would satisfy the expert users,” Yuji Igarashi, General Manager of Professional Imaging Group, Imaging Solutions Division, Fujifilm Corporation, tells PetaPixel.
“Of course, we can put the X-Processor 5 and the new X-Trans sensor in an X-Pro3 and call it X-Pro4, but that’s boring,” Igarashi says.
For the last couple of years, Fujifilm has said that it wants to give X-Pro users an updated camera that contains aspects that are worth having, not just a rehash of an existing product — in short, a product that exists simply to exist as a successor. Fujifilm instead wants to make something worthy of an upgrade. A good example of this is how it iterated on the X100 series with last year’s X100VI — the higher resolution sensor and the addition of the in-body image stabilization made for a markedly improved camera that gives photographers noticeable changes to how they take images.
Unfortunately, Fujifilm admits that in its efforts to give the X-Pro series this same glow-up, it has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that might be. Through that time, expectations of what would be an X-Pro4 continue to expand, making it even harder for Fujifilm to live up to those expectations. It’s a difficult problem: the longer it takes to develop it, the more difficult it will be to please fans of the series.
“We probably made it difficult for ourselves,” Igarashi admits. “Because we perhaps made the X-Pro too special.”
Photographers have repeatedly asked camera manufacturers to lean into their heritage and produce modern cameras with vintage design and charm. While some companies, like OM System and Nikon, have done so, both Canon and Ricoh Pentax don’t seem interested in following suit if design is the only reason.
Speaking with Canon and Ricoh Pentax separately at the CP+ show in Yokohama, Japan in February, executives from both organizations were clear about their feelings regarding a vintage-inspired camera design.
“We’re aware of the fact that other companies have provided vintage cameras that have become very popular and we know that there is an expectation for us to provide the same,” Manabu Kato, Unit Executive in Canon’s Imaging Business Operations, tells PetaPixel.
“But for us, we wouldn’t be happy with just developing a vintage-looking design. We would need to design everything from scratch for the lens, the accessories. We need to make sure that the entire system is well-balanced. So I think from that perspective, our perception is that this is a consideration, a study that would be very labor intensive for us to look into.”
Kato adds that vintage-inspired cameras don’t have a reputation for the best ergonomics, which is another factor it considers.
“For us, we’re very particular about the operability, like the grip and the handling. And we’re not sure that all of that can be delivered in a vintage design. So hereafter, we will need to look at all of these different aspects before we make the final determination on whether we should do it, to pursue it as a business or not.
So while Kato didn’t outright say “no” to the request for a vintage camera, the company’s notes of possible issues indicates it doesn’t feel as though making a vintage-inspired design would be the best decision for the company at this point.
Pentax Ricoh echoes these sentiments. Speaking to PetaPixel, Kazunobu Saiki — General Manager, Camera Business Division, at Ricoh — says the company wouldn’t make a vintage-looking camera without that choice having a purpose behind it.
“We don’t give special interest to making something based on a historical design, because that is just a model of acting by how something looks. That is not our philosophy,” Saiki says.
“Ricoh and Pentax have long histories, and our users know about our historical products, but the past is the past. We don’t give any priority to make our products nostalgic for that purpose alone. If there is a link to the function or features, of course, that is another story, but we don’t want to attract people because of the style, cosmetics, or decorations.”
Saiki’s note of an exception points to Ricoh Pentax’s design choices found in the Pentax 17 camera, which looks vintage because the form followed the function.
So while many photographers greatly desire a return of designs like the Canon Canonet or the Pentax K1000, both companies have expressed hesitance. That said, when PetaPixel suggested to Canon that a fixed-lens, compact camera would alleviate many of its stated concerns, Kato smiled politely.
Apple’s new Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is an impressive, powerful machine that is worthy of the “ultra” moniker. That said, it better be for the asking price. However, most photographers are probably better served getting the M4 Max version.
Last year, I praised the M4 Max chip in the MacBook Pro as providing a “notable jump in performance” versus previous Apple silicon iterations and that remains true in the desktop housing of the Mac Studio. In fact, while the chip and RAM are identical between the MacBook Pro I tested last fall and the Mac Studio tested this week — both pack 128GB of RAM — the Mac Studio’s larger housing and cooling system seems to be squeezing a bit more performance out, resulting in a computer that is significantly better than the best available Mac mini. While it can’t keep up with either the M2 Ultra or the M3 Ultra, the actual performance in real-world photo editing situations is minor.
Looking at the Lightroom benchmarks, when housed in the larger Mac Studio chassis, the M4 Max improves two out of three times (import times didn’t change, but both export times did). What we are seeing is that the M4 Max is not only better in desktop form than the exact same chip in a laptop, it’s better in Lightroom than the M2 Ultra which is an extremely powerful chip. This is especially impressive considering that the M4 Max Mac Studio costs $3,500 today while the M2 Ultra configuration I tested in 2023 cost $8,500.
Perhaps even more important to photographers is how good the M4 Max Mac Studio performs in Photoshop, too. We’re seeing a bit of an odd situation with the M3 Ultra in two different Photoshop benchmarks, as Jeremy explains in his review of the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, which means that at least today — until Adobe works on its optimizations for the fused-chip design of the Ultra — is that in Photoshop, the M4 Max Mac Studio is the computer to beat.
It’s not like you have to make the choice to only edit photos if you forgo the M3 Ultra. The M4 Max is no slouch in either Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve benchmarks, outperforming the M2 Ultra Mac Studio in the former and coming close to its performance in the latter. The M4 Max Mac Studio also wipes the floor with the new Mac mini across the board, too. So as appealing as that tiny form factor is and as good as the M4 Pro chip can be, it’s just outclassed.
PetaPixel has also been testing the longevity of Apple’s computers since the transition to in-house silicon and gratefully, these new machines are showing much better performance over the long-term than Apple’s Intel-based machines did. Today, the original M1 is finally feeling outdated. M2 is still doing great, with the Max and Ultra versions of those chips still going strong. We fully anticipate a brand-new M4 Max to last for quite a while.
For the price, the M4 Max is a hot-rod of a computer, especially compared to the asking price of Apple’s Ultra chips. You could argue that the M4 Pro Mac mini is the desktop solution most photographers can get by with, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio is the computer many will want, but the M4 Max Mac Studio is probably the computer that most photographers will actually need.
Fujifilm’s upcoming GFX Eterna cinema camera remains mostly under wraps. First announced last November, very little has been shared about the camera since. However, speaking to PetaPixel at CP+ in February, the company confirmed two more features.
Like the GFX100 II, the GFX Eterna cinema camera will feature a large format GFX 102-megapixel CMOS II HS image sensor which promises sensor readout speeds about two times faster than the sensor in the GFX100S, enabling the GFX100 II and the upcoming GFX Eterna cinema camera to deliver improved autofocus and better video features than earlier GFX cameras. PetaPixel has been told explicitly that the sensor in the upcoming GFX Eterna cinema camera is not new and is the same one that is shared with the GFX100 II, but it does have tuning improvements.
“The GFX Eterna cinema camera is based on the same sensor and same processor [as the GFX100 II],” a Fujifilm representative tells PetaPixel. “But today I have two additional new specifications that we can disclose. One is that the new GFX Eterna cinema camera will support higher decoding, which allows for 4K open gate. We could expand the read-out mode up to 4:3. That is why it will be the tallest sensor available in a filmmaking camera.”
Additionally, Fujifilm revealed that the sensor will have dual base ISO.
“The GFX Eterna cinema camera will have dual base ISO at 800 and 3200 in F-Log 2 and F-Log 2C. This is why we developed F-Log 2C for the GFX100 II, so of course for the GFX Eterna cinema camera, it will be supported.”
PetaPixel also asked Fujifilm if it considered using a lower resolution medium format sensor in lieu of the relatively slow-to-read-out 100-megapixel sensor in the upcoming video-oriented GFX camera.
“That’s of course technically possible. But the main reason we came up with GFX Eterna cinema camera is because people appreciate the image you can get, the footage you can get from the GFX100 II. We felt that it would make sense to come up with that first using the existing sensor and processor,” Fujifilm says. “We could technically do a lower resolution version, but just using that for one camera is going to be too expensive, I think, to make it available, accessible for everyone. So in terms of cost and the fact that we already have such requests based on the GFX100 II, it makes sense to have this GFX Eterna use the current sensor and format.”
In 2005, Sony Bravia filmed a striking ad for its televisions featuring a quarter of a million colorful bouncy balls hopping down the steep streets of San Francisco.
Sony teamed up with Fallon London for an ad designed to showcase the color capabilities of Sony’s Bravia TVs for a British audience. With no CGI involved, there really were 250,000 bouncy balls running through SF.
Filmed over four days, the crew closed off streets so that cinematographer Dan Landin could capture the balls bouncing in free motion. To prevent damage to windows or cars, the team erected nets to catch them. But ultimately, things got so chaotic that windows were broken and cars were dented.
But before the filming could commence, the team first had to acquire 250,000 bouncy balls which involved “calling every funfair, dealer, and Tivoli in America,” said Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig in a behind-the-scenes video. For a brief moment, there were no bouncy balls available for kids in the U.S.
SFGate recently spoke to the crew behind the ad who told them that a special launch system had to be put in place. This essentially involved cannons firing the balls up in the air so they would bounce high down the steep San Franciscan hills.
“They told us there’s 250,000 bouncy balls coming,” Barry Conner, who made the launch system, tells SFGate. “We thought, oh, well, it’ll fill up a few carts. Then these semis started showing up.”
But before any balls started bouncing, the crew first had to gain permission from the City and its residents.
“I really admire and have always been so grateful to Patrick Ranahan [the location scout]. This was by far the most difficult location managing job I’ve ever been involved with,” Fuglsig tells SFGate. “The fact that he managed to convince all the residents in all these neighborhoods to do this — I was very nervous about if we were gonna get a ‘no.’”
On the first day of the shoot, 25,000 balls were loaded into 12 mortars and six cameras were stationed around Fiber and Hyde Street as well as Jones and Union Street to capture the action.
Using specialized, slow-mo Photo-Sonics cameras, the crew wore Kevlar armor, riot shields, and helmets to protect themselves from the onslaught of bouncy balls.
Other members of the crew characterized it as “chaos” as some balls reached a top speed of around 130 miles per hour. Some of them bounced over houses into areas the crew didn’t think possible.
In one shot in the ad, you can see a piece of wood coming away from a house. The bill for broken windows came to $74,000 but the location scout Patrick Ranahan tells SFGate that despite the damage, people in the neighborhood loved it.
The shoot continued for several days until the city government ordered them to stop using mortars, which forced them to mount shipping containers filled with balls onto forklifts and drop them from 65 feet into the air.
Special effects and production specialist Barry Conner says that by the final day, the personal assistants hired to retrieve the balls had mostly left, and they were relying on spectators who had started gathering to watch the filming to collect them instead.
Set to José González’s dreamy Heartbeats song, the ad eventually premiered on British television before a big Premier League soccer game on November 6, 2005. It never aired in the United States.
There has been a lot of new gear for Gordon Laing of Cameralabs to review the last few months, but with CP+ now squarely in the rear-view mirror, the time is nigh for Laing to take a trip down memory lane for another Retro Review. This time, Laing’s target is the Canon PowerShot 350 from 1997, Canon’s second conventional digital camera and a fascinating relic of digital photography’s past.
Canon’s first conventional digital camera, the PowerShot 600, launched in 1996. Laing reviewed that model in 2021. Although the PowerShot 350 arrived just a year later, it looks dramatically different. As Laing explains, this is because Canon “didn’t actually make the PowerShot 350. Instead, it’s based on the Panasonic VZ-XP1 launched at the Comdex show one year earlier in 1996.”
“It wasn’t unusual during the early days of digital cameras for even the biggest names to share components or even rebrand entire models from other companies as they found their feet in the market. Preceding the later PowerShot A, G, S and Pro series, the 350 was a one-off, a gap-filler to test the market and one that’s quite hard to find today,” Laing writes.
After scoring one for about $40 on eBay after years of on-and-off searching, it was time for Laing to test the nearly 30-year-old Canon (or Panasonic) camera. The tall, beefy camera features a laughably small Type 1/3 CCD sensor with 350,000 pixels. While that may sound like a fair bit when phrased like that, it is a 0.31-megapixel sensor, the same megapixel count as Apple’s first digital camera, the 1994 classic QuickTake 100.
The camera sports a massive crop factor thanks to its tiny sensor, turning its built-in 6mm f/2.8 lens into a 43mm equivalent prime. Between the fixed focal length lens, complete lack of manual control over settings (save for exposure compensation), and finicky menu system, the Canon PowerShot 350 delivers a rather frustrating photographic experience.
However, Laing argues the PowerShot 350 is worth considering in 2025, if not for its capabilities as a camera, as an interesting footnote in Canon’s storied digital camera history. The PowerShot 350 arrived at a flashpoint in photography as companies grappled with evolving digital sensors and how consumers might want to use them.
Photographers may want to look at later Canon digital cameras if they are interested in a more usable vintage camera. Still, if they want to “turn some heads,” the PowerShot 350 is a unique option in Canon’s illustrious library.
Laing delivers an in-depth breakdown of the Canon PowerShot 350 in his video review above and the written version on Cameralabs. Readers will find many more real-world sample photos in all their 0.3-megapixel glory there.
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