Why haven’t all camera brands perfected the art and science of colour? After all, they have surely been at it long enough.
Even the most recent brands to make digital cameras have been doing it for at least twenty-five years.
Yet we still hear that the colours from Brand X are off and that they tend to green or magenta or whatever, or that the skin tones are too orange or red or something.
Fuji made film long before they started making digital cameras, and if you read the forums you will hear people laud Fuji colour science.
When I shot Nikon I thought Nikon images gave a more neutral representation of scenes in nature. Certainly they were better at reproducing greens faithfully.
And Ricoh, at least from the evidence of the GR III that I shoot with, also gives neutral colours.
But back to Fuji, because part of ‘amazing colour science’ is that the SOOC (straight out of camera) JPEGs also have ‘amazing colour science’.
So here are two images. One is a RAW file converted to JPEG, and the other is a SOOC JPEG.
SOOC JPEG means that I set the camera to record a RAW file and a JPEG with every shot I took. So the two photos here are the same image, with one processed in the camera to make a JPEG and the other version left as a RAW file.
With the SOOC JPEG the camera did all the work preparing the JPEG, and I did nothing except resize for the Web.
With the RAW file, I processed it with Adobe Camera Raw and then resized for the Web.
Why You Might Care
I generally shoot RAW because there will be times when I mess up the exposure when taking the shot. And RAW files give a lot more leeway in tweaking them than JPEGs do. There’s a technical reason for that, but I won’t get into it here.
But assuming you don’t mess up the exposure and you want to share images without using post-processing software like Photoshop, then it helps if the JPEGs are so good that you don’t need to post process them at all.
So then the only question is, does Fuji fit the bill? Are the two versions of the image above pretty indistinguishable?
Marie-Louise Christophe was the only Queen of Haiti. She was born a slave in what was then known as the French colony of the Saint-Domingue. After independence she ruled with King Henri Christophe until his death in 1820 when the monarchy collapsed.
She lived the rest of her life in exile, and as the plaque states, she lived in this house in 1824. She lived in continental Europe thereafter, dying in Italy in 1851.
The Photos
The first photo is of the plaque on the wall of the house on Weymouth Street in London.
The second photo is of the house on which the plaque is displayed.
I took the photo of the plaque with my phone and the photo of the house with a little camera I bought recently.
As you can tell. the photo of the house is not top quality. But I came to use it because of something I saw on Instagram.
What happened was that on Instagram I saw little videos of this guy who’s taking photos with a little camera that prints out the photos in black and white on thermal paper.
It’s like a low-grade Polaroid or Fuji Instax camera.
The guy does little videos, probably on an action camera, of him holding the little camera he is using to take photos. And then he’s handing a print to the person he’s photographing, as a little gift. We see a range of reactions. Some people make a display out of thanking him and smiling. Other people are more matter of fact. Occasionally we see people who are not really willing to play the game.
Then we see how he prints a second print and puts it in his album.
If you want to find him on Instagram, his handle is wubiduw.
I looked at his feed and I see people are asking him what camera it is. But I don’t see an answer.
So I take screen shot of the camera and put it into Google image search and add text to explain I want to identify this instant-print camera.
Google tells me it is a Lomo model by Lomography. I say, no it’s not because Lomo does not make a camera that prints photos instantly like this one does.
Google tells me I am wrong: It’s a Lomo.
I tell Google it is wrong and I am right because I have seen videos of the camera in operation with the little prints coming out of the camera.
And Google tells me again that I am wrong.
You must have had visions of the future where the robots flat out contradict humans. I guess the film 2001 was one of the earliest.*
Well here was my stand-off with Google, and I feel it that it is just plain wrong and should listen when someone tells it facts.
At that point it ignores the image I uploaded so that it can contradict me again.
I abandon that and google ‘cameras that print in black and white on thermal paper’ which was probably a better search in the first place.
And I find lots of kids’ cameras on Amazon.
Undecided as to which to go for, I chose the one that looked most like the one that wubiduw used.
It comes with a micro sd card in place so if you wish you can download the images and print them however you like on whatever you like.
It came with three rolls of thermal paper. The camera is cheap, and the bonus is that multiple rolls of thermal paper for these cameras are also very cheap. And no batteries because it charges via USB. Did I mention it also does videos?
Here it is. It is about 10cm (4 inches) long and it weighs 225g.
Postscript
* Frankenstein is arguably the first modern version of an artificial, created being that turns against its maker.
