The Fujifilm X-H1 - Part Two - A Night With Warrewyk

I always like to go to the Fujifilm equipment shows when Warrewyk Williams is in town. He's the national training manager for Fujifilm Australia and every single time he's presented a new product he's had something surprising to say about the cameras. He fills in the gaps in knowledge that even Fuji Rumours leaves open. Of course some information is not released too far ahead of time - and for good reason. There are stumbling blocks to any manufacturing and marketing exercise and making much of something that never eventuates is damaging to a firm's reputation. No names, no pack drill...Even a minor hitch like a slightly faulty firmware update that has to be switched off again is awkward. So we can't ask too many mean questions when he opens the floor for discussion - he may not be in a position to tell us all he knows. What he did point out - besides the history of the Fujifilm APS-C focus - was the way that the new X-H1 is able to integrate with the new Fujifilm cinema lenses. It contributes extreme weather sealing and robustness as well as a five-stop in-body image stabiliser and a number of deliberately cinematic operational modes. The new lenses - physically big 18-55mm and 50-135mm cinematic specials - add constant focus lock while zooming, no size change for the subject while focusing, and constant positioning in the lens axis for the subject. These are things that we still shooters do not think about from shot to shot - but the video people need to have them all the time. Even the physical size and position of the focus and aperture ring needs to be the same on both those new lenses - they will be swapped in and out of video rigs while filming and the last thing the cameraman wants to have to do is reconstruct and reconfigure the thing with Allen keys and bad language between shots. Some of the questions from the floor on a product evening can be very good - one involved thee number of shutter actuations one might expect from the Fujifilm cameras. It was suggested that 350,000 was not an impossible figure. Our Service manager pointed out that in 7 years of this brand being sold by Camera Electronic there have been no shutter replacements. This is comforting - I remember some Fujifilm large format panorama film cameras with shutter counters at the bottom of the bodies that tacked up the dismal number until you had to have a main spring replaced. Another person asked whether the lenses needed to be calibrated individually on the camera as they may need to do on some DSLR cameras. Again the answer was no - very, very few examples of lens adjustment ever being needed in the Fujifilm service department in NSW. And as a final cute product - The Fujifilm Instax SQ 10 is a combination digital and instant camera - you can blet around using it for purely digital capture on an SD card and then let out the occasional Instax instant print when you need a handout for people - that's a pretty sound way to do casual shooting on an economical basis while still being able to win friends and influence people with the prints.