gdanmitchell
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 Re: X-E5: The end of the X-Pro line? | |
ow many times does Fuji have to tell you the X-Pro line is still alive yet not show any concrete steps toward producing one for you to believe it? ;-)
Fujifilm's answers to the "will there be another XPro" are always counted in ambiguity, often of the sort that encourages the listener/reader to believe what they already hoped/believed.
The XPro _was_ a brilliant camera. (I owned and loved the XPro2 for years.) It answered a concern that photographers considering a move to mirrorless had — namely that the performance of EVFs when the line began was pretty poor, with slow frame rates, low resolution, jerkiness, and generally poor image quality. It didn't help that everyone (or nearly everyone) was accustomed to the "organic" display of DSLR, to the point that we didn't think about their problems (mirror blackout anyone? visibility in low light?) while we most certainly WERE worried about the new technology.
So the XPro gave us the best of both worlds — the immediacy of the optical viewfinder and the display potential of the EVF, along with the latter's ability to work with pretty much any lens — long, short, big aperture, large zoom. (The OVF plays well with small-ish aperture lenses with somewhat wide to slightly long focal lengths, but doesn't play well with many other lenses we might use.)
But since then the photographic world has almost completely adopted the EVF model and we don't hear many complaints about it any more. The EVF displays have improved greatly, to the point that they are objectively better than OVF displays in many situations and the ares in which they are arguably still behind have decreased to the point that the EVF is now regarded as the norm.
So the perceived need for an OVF display, while it hasn't entirely disappeared, has diminished to the point that the market for the remarkable hybrid display is now extremely small.
On the other hand, the interest in rangefinder-style cameras continues. One reason (at least for the right-eye-dominant among us) is the position of the viewfinder. Another is that retro associations with the design. The design also allows for some really small cameras. (Putting the viewfinder and its display in line with the lens requires some additional vertical size — moving the viewfinder away from the lens is more flexible.)
We don't know what Fujifilm will do with the XPro line. As a respected legacy system, the concept still has an appeal. As a real-world product, the hybrid viewfinder design has far less appeal than it once had, plus it introduces some design/manufacturing complexity that has to raise the cost of manufacture.
Could Fujifilm actually bring out a hybrid viewfinder XPro4? Nothing is impossible, I suppose, But given the small market it would reach, the manufacturing costs, and the fact that some percentage of sales would come at the expense of sales of other models, I have to think that Fujifilm sees the writing on the wall.
XPro release history
XPro1 — 2012
XPro2 — 2016
XPro3 - 2019
XPro models were released every 3-4 years. We are now six years past the XPro3, and the earliest speculation for a rumored Xpro4 is not until at least 2026, and some suggest later. While Fujifilm's marketing arm answers questions about the line in ways that allow hope of a new model to live on, there is no concrete information about a new model coming — just rumors.
There is one way Fujifilm could keep the line alive, and there's a possibility that the XE5 _might_ be an early move in this direction — toward an upgraded XE that gets full manual controls (not omitting things like ISO dials) that are found on the top-of-line cameras, a camera that we could think of as an EVF-only "XEPro."
In a sense, the market positioning of the XE5 diminishes the likelihood of an old-school hybrid XPro4.
We're all speculating here, and I cop to that up front.
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