Re: Why am I using the X-Pro3 more than the a7cR????
mjm6 wrote: Nielk Mike wrote:
Film Simulations are a "Marketing Gimmick" for me (and there is a history behind them cause Fuji's only claim to fame at the time was their long experience with film and color).
I'm guessing you are young enough to not remember the film days, but people were (and still are) very much attached to certain looks that a particular film would produce. Used film prices for long out of date film stock is an attestation to the merit of developing a specific film simulation. People like the way certain films portrayed the world and some people would prefer to work within those constraints.
Further, you clearly don't know the history of Fujifilm cameras and their partnerships in the past, including lenses and bodies for several Hasselblad bodies and systems, like the now cult-like X-Pan cameras and lenses for the H system when Hasselblad went away from Carl Zeiss. In addition Fujifilm produced many excellent film bodies and systems, including my favorite, the GX617 bodies that utilized their excellent large format lenses in an interchangeable 6x17cm body, for four glorious shots per roll of 120 film.
On top of that, they produced a line of large format lenses, some of which no other manufacturer produced a similar competitor to, some of which came out of their industrial optical manufacturing background and found their way into the commercial space. They're excellent lenses and their coating technologies were second to none back in the day.
I don't personally use film simulations because I want my image captures to be more like a negative than a positive, but I completely see the value and merit of them, even if you don't.
The whole thing about different film stocks back in the day (yes, I come from that era) was very different than the attitude about film sims today.
Back then it was about choosing a film best fit for whatever your were photographing for the most part. If you didn’t need speed and you might print large, your preference might be a low ISLO (ASA, actually…) film with small grain. For various reasons, you might prefer to shoot slide stock, in which case you weighed the pluses and minuses of (for example) ektachrome and kodachrome. And then there was Provia… ;-)
You weren’t trying to “look like film.” Film was all there was, so you selected whatever best fit your needs. (I there had been an easy way to use some sort of neutral film that could be pushed in camera from shot to shot in different custom ways, that might have been interesting, but it wasn’t possible except with sheet film.)
Today, sims don’t really serve a purpose at all like that. It is about trying to look like the film stocks of a bygone era, another iteration of the “retro” interest.
Oddly perhaps, today’s raw mode, which doesn’t really “color” things significantly, and then adjusting to taste in post is more like what the sheet film folks did back then. They would make an exposure with the eventual post-processing in mind, and do so differently on each frame. That is essentially, more or less, what raw mode lets us do today. It is far more flexible and adaptable than using a sim that acts like the present qualities of one of the old film stocks.
Jul 29, 2025 at 08:58 AM
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