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 p.1 #10 · GFX: Fuji color without the X-trans nonsense? | |
QuantumTarsus wrote:
Okay, ignoring the arguments that any color** can be achieved with editing, has anyone considered getting into the GFX line of cameras to get Fuji colors without the X-trans sensor nonsense?
Yes, I know that with editing I could get any camera files close to Fuji colors. However, I hate editing and would much rather start with Fuji colors as a base. I've tried Fuji APS-C cameras and have been quite disappointed. Between Lightroom's still poor handling of Fuji files and unsatisfactory higher ISO performance, I've been let down too many times.
I'm currently locked into Lightroom since I also shoot film and will not give up Negative Lab Pro, and I have no desire to learn another editing program just for X-trans files.
So then the thought occurred to me -- the GFX line allows for Fuji colors with a Bayer sensor (and by most accounts better ISO performance than a lot of FF sensors).
I'm perfectly fine with the limitations of the GFX cameras. When I look back at some of my favorite photos over the years, very few of them have relied on lighting fast AF or super telephoto zoom lenses. I've just gotten into 4x5 large format and appreciate the slow process, so I could easily see myself being content with one good wide angle zoom AF lens, one good normal-short tele AF lens, and MF glass for any other needs.
Has anyone else had a similar thought? Am I at risk of just wasting time and money pursuing this line of reasoning?
**As an aside, does anyone have any experience with Cobalt Image profiles? Is the Fuji pack (or any of the other profiles) really as good as their website examples suggest?...Show more →
I’m not sure that would be the best reason to get GFX. There are reasons, but this isn’t it.
Regarding the x-trans sensor business… there’s a lot of history there. My basic opinion, up front, is that x-trans makes little overall difference one way or the other. The results are not identical to Bayer sensor cameras, but the difference rarely amount to much, and they arguably cut both ways.
x-trans was introduced at about the time that other manufacturers were starting to introduce cameras that eschewed AA filtering: the Nikon D800, Canon 5DsR, and early Sony A7r bodies. (If I recall correctly, two of those literally had no AA filters and one “cancelled” the AA filtering.) There were also some larger format cameras at that time w/o AA filtering.
Since the doctrine for some years had been that “AA filtering is necessary to suppress aliasing/moire,” there was a lot of concern about the downsides of eliminating AA filtering — mainly that photographs would exhibit objectionable moire effects. (I recall that I was concerned about this, as were many others, and I carefully compared otherwise identical images from the AA-filtering 5Ds and the non-AA-filtering 5DsR before getting the 5DsR. What was the better trade-off? A bit more sharpness or less risk of moire? In the end, it barely made a difference either way.)
I think that Fujifilm’s introduction of the x-trans array was largely targeted at those who were then still very worried about the moire potential of AA-filter-free systems. The claim was that the lower frequency of the repeating RGB pattern would suppress aliasing effects, though sometimes people went so far as to (incorrectly) imply that the array was “pseudo random” (it isn’t) or that it would “eliminate” aliasing (it doesn’t). But for those of us who were concerned in the early days of cameras without AA filtering that we’d see our images wrecked by moire, this was reassuring.
Eventually, it turned out that things don’t work quite that way. While it is possible to get moire from a sensor without AA filtering (there are plenty of fabric photos on the web to demonstrate this), in the great majority of cases images did not exhibit this problem. And, as some forget, even cameras with AA filtering sometimes produce images with moire. So the difference turned out to be largely academic.
I think Fujifilm knows this, too. If the x-trans array was truly necessary to suppress aliasing effects… they would have arranged to have it on the miniMF sensors. (Sony cold put x-trans filtering on their sensors for the APS-C cameras, so they could do the same for the 33x44 Sony sensors used in GFX.) They did not, and we don’t hear a great outcry over the awful effects of aliasing on the non-x-trans GFX cameras…
But a couple of things happened. First, Fujifilm had made so much of the original claim that x-trans suppressed aliasing in their cameras, that it would be a hard to now say that this isn’t really true. Second, the notion of “Fuji colors” somehow became associated with the use of x-trans. I think that is largely nonsense, and that “colors” from sensors both come from other aspects of sensor/camera design and are more subjective than real. As the OP points out, most people believe that you get the supposed “Fuji Colors” from the GFX Bayer sensors!
I would love to see Fujifilm just let the whole x-trans thing go at this point. The irony is that they have the perfect marketing environment to do just that, once and for all. They would just have to announce something along the lines of: “The advances we have made in sensor design in our acclaimed industry-leading GFX system are now coming to our x-series cameras!”
In a sense I am agreeing with your characterization of the Fujifilm marketing of x-trans as being “nonsense” at this point. But that’s a marketing issue, not a camera issue. You can, as I have, learn to mostly ignore that nonsense when using the cameras, and they produce fine image quality. There are reasons to use GFX… but I don’t think this is one of them.
As pointed out, the whole “colors” thing is far more the result of stuff like your approach to post-processing or using the sims/profiles, if that is your thing.
YMMV.
Edited on Jun 24, 2025 at 11:38 AM · View previous versions
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