Fujifilm executive: ‘Video is a huge growth area for us’

Fujifilm, which previously appeared content to live in the small niche it had carved out for itself among still photographers, is on the move. Last week, the company revealed final pricing on its brand new GFX 50S and also announced two replacement APS-C models: the X100F and X-T20. The X-T20 becomes Fujifilm’s second camera to offer 4K video, which the company sees as “a big growth area,” according to an interview with DPReview.

Fujifilm surprised everyone when it introduced 4K video in the higher-end X-T2 last year, bringing with it such professional features as clean HDMI output and the flat F-Log gamma profile.

“In Japan, the developers worked very closely with production studios. A lot of their feedback shaped the outcome of the X-T2’s video quality and the way it operates,” Fujifilm’s Billy Luong, Manager for Technical Marketing, said in the interview.

The X-T2’s professional features are a result of that collaboration, but Fujifilm also acknowledged that “a generation of YouTube content providers” inspired the company to focus on video.

Mirrorless cameras have grown increasingly popular among filmmakers and videographers, mostly thanks to Sony and Panasonic, which have both been proactive about adding high-end video functionality to their cameras. Fujifilm isn’t widely known among consumers as a video brand, but that could change. As Luong hinted, “We already have cinema lenses that are Super 35.”

The Super 35 format is a standard used by professional filmmakers that happens to be virtually identical in frame size to the APS-C sensors used in Fujifilm’s X Series cameras (and those of many other manufacturers). Fujifilm has long made high-end cinema lenses to work with production cameras from other companies. While Luong’s comment doesn’t confirm anything, it offers hope that Fujifilm is taking video seriously. He added, “We’re continuing to develop video features, so we’ll continue to investigate.”