Fuji’s New Raw Converter: Fujifilm X Raw Studio
Among the several things announced by Fujifilm this morning, including the new XE-3, the company also revealed that they are working on some new software for converting raw files. The software, called “Fujifilm X Raw Studio” works in a somewhat unique way. Rather than processing your raw files on your computer, it connects to your Fuji camera and uses the cameras processor to do the conversion.
I have to say, that I am both intrigued and somewhat confused by this approach. I understand what Fuji is doing here. It’s basically providing a software front end for the cameras on board raw conversion capabilities, which is a pretty clever thing to do, but I don’t get why they couldn’t just emulate this in software. They claim it is because it is faster to use the camera processor, and I understand that it would be pretty instant seeing as how its baked into the cameras silicon, but surely a modern multicore processor can’t be that slow at doing his kind of conversion, especially as you still have to send the data over usb to and from the camera int he first place.
There’s also the issue of running the cameras battery down. I’m sure it will be fine for short uses, but given how transferring images over wifi kills the battery on my X-Pro 2, I’m not sure how it would hold up to an extended session converting RAW files. Still, it’s an interesting idea, and I’m sure many Fuji users will be very excited about this.
The details are pretty limited at the moment though. It’s unclear if this will let you save anything other than Jpeg. For example, will it give you the option of using Tiff for example. Here’s what the press release says:
FUJIFILM Corporation (President: Kenji Sukeno) has announced that it is developing a new RAW conversion system, “FUJIFILM X RAW STUDIO”.
“FUJIFILM X RAW STUDIO” enables users to quickly and easily convert RAW files with outstanding image quality, once a camera is connected to a Mac or PC via USB cable.
Exceptional image quality is retained, as the X RAW STUDIO system utilizes the X Processor Pro in the camera instead of the CPU in the computer,
Due to the increasing size of RAW files, users have found batch conversion to be an issue, as it takes more and more time as a result. However, using the high performance “X Processor Pro” processor, this batch conversion is handled far more efficiently as a result.
This new software is due to be available from late November 2017
It should be noted, that it will only work using the same camera that the files are from. For example an X-Pro 2 will be required to work with X-Pro 2 files.
So far there are four cameras listed as being compatible, and they will all require a firmware update. They are:
- FUJIFILM GFX 50S
- FUJIFILM X-T2
- FUJIFILM X-Pro2
- FUJIFILM X100F
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