Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
A new reaction video to Edvard’s “How to preform autofocus tests” by Iamtongue has been getting a lot of attention and adding to the momentum of the Fuji autofocus problems.
Iamtongue is a primarly known as a Fuji user, who mainly does photoshoots and is known for his stunning portrait photos. Four month ago, inspired by Edvard’s videos, he also did an autofocus test with his X-T5 and posted his findings in this video. While he still mainly uses Fuji cameras (for now) he does also own a Sony that he uses when he needs a better autofocusing performance (and I sense that he is also entertaining the thought of switching to a more reliable system, probably Nikon).
**BTW here is the link to the catch Fujifilm song**
The 5-year-old X-T3 autofocus test
In the comments section Tommy Callaway posted an autofocus test video he did 5 years ago, with his X-T3 with firmware 3.0, and the results are amazing – the autofocus is smooth, snappy, on target, and we could say on Sony-level.
This brings us to the conclusion that at that time the autofocus was working very well and something happened since then, that severely deteriorated the autofocus performance of Fuji’s latest cameras.
One person did comment that Fujifilm breached Phase Ones autofocus patent, probably this one, and after an out of court settlement, they were forced to abandon this technology and develop their own. Could this be the reason of the sudden quality drop in autofocus performance?
Perhaps, but it is not an excuse – Fujifilm engineers should have by now figured a way to have functioning autofocus on their cameras. The false positive eye/face icons might be due to the implementation of AI technology or its inability to accurately communicate with the cameras software.
Hopefully it is only a software issue that can be fixed or at least greatly improved. Fujifilm could at least revert the autofocus functionality to the first versions of the firmware upgrades, where many testers have found it to work much more reliably. That could be a temporary fix that would give more time to Fuji engineers to fix the problem.
Fuji owners are eagerly awaiting the November firmware update as many have stated that his is Fuji’s last chance to fix autofocus or else they are switching camera systems. I suspect the second hand Fuji camera market might be overwhelmed by so many offers, but time will tell.
