THE CULT OF FUJI -
PART TWO

FEBRUARY 7, 2025

                                                                  PORTLAND'S NEWEST TOWER - BLACK AND WHITE BY FUJI

This week I would like to describe how a simple decision to buy a new (old) camera has introduced me to another consumer cult. Last week I recounted the demise of my 17-year old Canon digital SLR, my first and only digital camera. After weighing my options, I decided to leap two technologies and ten years to buy into the Fujifilm camera system. My new 7-year old camera changed the computer/camera interface in two major ways. The digital breakthrough allowed photographers like me to utilize the computers in our homes to fundamentally change the way we manipulated our original camera captures into finished images. The darkroom was replaced by software programs that gradually improved and changed in ways that even the software engineers had not anticipated and even tried to resist. The other major change was the abandoning of the entire concept of using a set of mirrors to focus and monitor exposure through the actual lens of the camera. The same advances in electronics that replaced film with digital sensors now allowed camera designers to replace the optical viewfinders of the single lens reflex with what essentially a small TV screen either on the back of the camera or in a vestigial viewfinder that mimicked the old systems - or both!

                                      BISTRO SEATING ON DIVISION, ENHANCED BY FUJI

These technological changes occurred as the good-old fashioned story of business innovation and more importantly plain incompetence played out across continents. The original patents for the digital camera were held by Kodak. Since Kodak was the largest film producer on the planet they made the incredibly poor decision to not endanger their cash cow, film sales and production. Meanwhile, their only real worldwide competitor, Fuji in Japan, took the opposite tack, which allowed them to keep selling film while embracing the new technologies that would seal film’s demise. Kodak had bet that film would reign supreme for twenty years or so while digital cameras caught up in actual image quality and far more important for the vast consumer market, went down in price enough to compete with the established film ecosystem. I finally gave up film in 2008 when even I saw the handwriting on the wall, Kodak’s bet was off by a good decade, and for all intents and purposes the company is no more. As a kind of middle-finger to it’s old competition, My new-old camera still proudly sports the Fujifilm label, as do all of their digital cameras. All of the images shown here are the result of my experiments trying  to both overcome and ignore a rather daunting learning curve while I respond to my new camera.

                                                                  LANTERNS AT A SUSHI PARLOR ON DIVISION - THE ONLY OTHER BRANCH IS IN TOKYO!

Fuji was never as big a camera company as its major Japanese competitors, Nikon and Canon.    When the third major innovation came along with the worldwide smartphone revolution, Fuji was in some ways in a better position than its bigger rivals, in that it had far less to lose as point and shoot camera sales plummeted off everyone’s sales charts. So the smaller company made a conscious decision to become a luxury brand by making really good products that did not appeal to the vast majority of consumers because of design or price. It figured that it could stay in business as a Porsche rather than as a Ford. Or in terms of the hundred-year old camera business, could it position itself as the new Leica?

                                                                  TREE TRUNK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Leica was the innovator that created the first “small” cameras that could compete in quality with the much larger film cameras of the early Twentieth Century. The sheet film that required loading and unloading in complete darkness was replaced by modified movie film that was so much smaller that it could be loaded into a hand-held camera that was as small as the simple Kodak box cameras that made up the small consumer market. The Leica cameras were state of the art, and almost handmade, both before the war, during the war, and somehow even after the Second World War as a surviving German company. While I saw a vintage “SS Edition” of a wartime Leica during my trip to Germany in 2006, the company had also ran a variation of “Schindler’s List” for its employees during the war.

                ROAD CLOSED

Leica’s business model was so compelling in that the camera almost never really changed. My father bought a fairly complete Leica kit in 1953, albeit with less expensive lenses that were licensed by Leica and made in Canada. In percentage terms, it was probably the most expensive purchase my father ever made, even though it was essentially the same camera as the pre-war model. While Leica “screwed” my father by abandoning its original screw-mount lens design the year I was born in 1956, it really didn’t matter since my father was in no position to purchase any newer Leica gear. The camera changed even less throughout my father’s life, becoming even more of a luxury product. A 1956 lens could still be used on a “new” Leica forty years later.

                                       DIVISION FACADE DETAIL

Fuji endeavored to produce a digital Leica despite Leica’s refusal to consider moving away from film or the older rangefinder focusing and exposure system that had been replaced in the Sixties by the modern SLR, never mind the newer DSLR. Fuji’s first iteration was such a throwback that it was a literal copy of my father’s camera with a digital back, and was almost as small as my father’s Leica. It became an instant hit among the camera enthusiast crowd - not only was it a Porsche, but like the never-changing Porsche 911, it was a new vintage Porsche!

                                                                  VERY UNDERSTATED RESTAURANT SIGN IN FRONT OF A DIVISION PIZZA PARLOR

It took a few years for Fuji to expand its premium line to include a mirrorless camera that in some ways was even more of an illusion than its original rangefinder model. While those X-Pro models had included a dual optical/electronic rangefinder, the new X-T1 model mimicked the forty-year old SLR designs that most photographers who had never owned Leicas were more familiar with. In some ways it was ridiculous that the old centrally located mirror hump now contained a TV screen that didn’t need a hump, but there you had it. In almost every other way the camera was still a pseudo-Leica, with enough manual controls to satisfy any photographer who harkened back to any number of previous “golden ages” of camera design.

                                      MULTNOMAH COUNTY PRARIE

This is where I came in, and I promise to actually reveal my realization of the cult status of my new-old camera next time. My X-T3 from 2016 will soon be even more vintage with this year’s rumored X-T6, but it will still be essentially the same camera as the original X-T1. Fuji has become so successful at copying Leica that it has in some ways become Leica. Resistance is futile.