New Body Rumours

[nar53]

Hello All

 

We have plenty of rumours flying around re the X-T2, X-Pro2 X-E3 (2s) but what about the occosionaly mentioned Monochrome only body?

 

I for one, and I'm sure many others are waiting to hear & then rush out & buy this!

 

Cheers....

[milandro]

I beg to differer and sincerely hope that Fuji will never follow this minority and in my opinion extravagant trend.

 

There are already enough cameras suiting the supposed “ needs" for this monochrome " one trick pony" feature and if you wish to profusely and lavishly spend you money on a camera that does one thing alone, I suppose that you should rush out and buy one of these?

 

But I suppose that the reason for not doing this would be that these extravagant cameras are very expensive and that you are longing for a cheap Fuji body to perform this one trick?

 

One of the reasons why any camera which would only sell in limited amounts always ends up being so expensive is that the entire costs of its development and realization of a production line, marketing, advertising and distribution, has to be spread among the limited amount sales of this minority market segment.

 

How large is this market? Not very large. Which returns a high cost in all but one case ( The Sigma Foveon) which while a aps-c is not really a monochrome sensor like the other cameras have.

 

Besides, Fuji, which as a camera company heavily depends on other for the sensor which they use, don’t have the sensor which could do this off the shelf.

 

They don’t have the option (even if they wanted to) to buy someone else’s sensor because, because of their lenses, it would have to be a aps-c sized one ( the only option therefore would do the same as what Sigma did)  and , as far as I can tell there aren’t any proper monochrome sensors of this size.

 

You could though, but at a very high cost, have a Fuji camera of your choice made into a monochromatic camera pretty much the same way (but more expensively and with higher complication) as people have been converting their cameras to infrared.

 

Here’s where

 

http://www.maxmax.com

 

http://www.maxmax.com/maincamerapage

 

http://www.maxmax.com/shopper/category/9241-monochrome-cameras

 

For now they only seem to offer Sony, Nikon and Canon conversion

 

• “..........Monochrome: The ICF/AA filter stack is remove, sensor coverglass, microlenses and CFA.  We have a variety of options for how the camera is put back together.........."

 

 

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www.MaxMax.com

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[danwells]

A "factory monochrome" wouldn't be that hard for Fuji to do, for a few reasons.

 

1.) The X-series is already getting a custom filter pack that nothing else uses, so Fuji is either modifying the sensor stack themselves (getting bare sensors from Sony and attaching the filter pack) OR paying Sony to do custom work - it's possible that SONY makes and attaches the X-Trans filter to Fuji's specification, but if so, they are certainly doing something beyond "ship Fuji 1000 IMX071 sensor assemblies". Since the filter pack is ALREADY modified, it wouldn't be a big deal to add "oh, put a piece of clear optical glass on a few of those instead of the XTrans".

 

2.) Fujis don't use an AA filter, which is one of the trickier pieces of the sensor stack to deal with. As far as I know, no mono camera (stock or conversion) does either.

 

3.) They are already (supposedly) doing an "X-T1 IR" for a couple hundred dollars extra. That is almost exactly the same piece of work, except for messing with the ISO.

 

Anyway, it would be trivial for Fuji to turn out even a few hundred of these - the biggest piece of custom work is probably recalibrating the ISO and making custom ISO dials if the original camera had one(a mono camera is quite a bit faster, and might have a base ISO of 500 or 640, depending on how dense the XTrans filter that gets removed is). Since it's trivial, why not? Total sales will probably be in he hundreds or low thousands per year, but it may well lure some photographers to the X-system -  someone buys a monochrome even though they aren't primarily a Fuji shooter, likes it, adds a color body and more lenses...

[milandro]

it would cost a more to make anything out of standard and for any minority market. They do it with the IR, and it cost about  $2,000, which is not so much more, but it cost more