Electric cattle prod wanted.

So Fuji finally posts some sample images from the X100 on its site and, boy, are they real stinkers or what?

Not only is the quality of the photography simply execrable (flowers? FLOWERS?), they look like poorly exposed and processed low quality JPGs. Click the picture below to go to their site:

Click picture for Fuji’s site with originals.

The images include one of a US Mailbox at f/2, with so inappropriate a background that all the burned out highlights make the lens OOF rendition look very poor. They couldn’t even be bothered to get the orientation of the downloaded image correct! Another, the snap of the tree in snow through a barn door, could hardly be exposed or processed more poorly. It looks like something from the days when you used a printing paper two grades too soft with an overexposed original which had burned out whatever goodness ever existed in the highlights.

I mean, gimme a break here. You spend major money developing a camera that every serious photographer cannot wait to get his hands on. You generate major pre-release buzz. You finally provide what looks like a real viewfinder in a digital camera which actually sports analog dials for us analog humans. How much would it take to give away half a dozen of the bloody things to crack photographers at Vogue/Harpers’/National Geographic and have them provide you with a few images, gratis, free and for nothing, that actually do your creation justice? Doesn’t it read ‘The Professional’s Choice’ in the masthead? Instead, Fuji, you have Messrs. Ito and Nakamura or whoever, snappers who have yet to learn the difference between exposure and dropping their underwear in public, make your sample photographs for display to the whole world? Is this the first impression you seek to make?

Let’s hope Fuji’s photographic talent and processing technique are inversely proportional to the quality of the images its new camera is capable of producing.

Now pretty much confirmed at $1,200, with March delivery in the US. I am on the pre-order list at Amazon but, goodness, am I tempted to hit the ‘Delete’ key or what? $1,200 is not chump change, even if it does leave $8,800 change from an M9 with a 35mm Summicron.