A Losers Guide to Photography: The Perfect Film Simulation Camera

My main camera I use is the Fuji XPro-3 from Fujifilm. I love it. There are a lot of great things about the camera and there are a lot of things I wish were different or expanded upon further. 

I believe the ultimate film camera will be a mash up of the Fuji XPro-3 and the Leica M-d Type 262 with a film advance lever. 

Let's picture this. The body of a vintage Nikon F-1 or a sleek Leica body. Let's make this camera a rangefinder with the option to switch to an EVF (XPro-3). Let's add a nice feeling film advance lever. The software can have a conditional statement that says, "if film advance lever does not equal 1, do nothing. Else, advance to the next slide, set film advance lever to 0". Something like that. Digital double exposure has been around for a while now. I suppose I don't see a technological issue of saying the photographer doesn't want to automatically advance the film and let them manually do it with a film advance lever. A film reverse button needs to be included too. A simple toggle switch to say "go to the previous slide", which can then be further progressed with a dial.

Next, let's take the back of the Leica M-d 10 with how minimalistic it is and the Fuji XPro-3's film window that let's you see what film profile is selected. I don't want the flip out LCD screen. You're probably wondering, "but how will you change your settings?" The XPro-3 allows you to see and change your settings with the EVF. Yes smaller text, but if you want to have an expanded view a simple app could be developed that works over Bluetooth/WIFI, which is how I believe the Leica M-d Type 262 works. 

One thing I like about the Fuji XPro-3 is the ability to create new film profiles. However, there are a few things I don't like about this. The first being it's not loaded into the firmware and so any custom film simulation, other than the built in ones, take a second or two to process. The second is not being able to easily load custom profiles from my computer. The third fault is not being able to load custom pictures to the back LCD to show which film is selected. Maybe I want to load HP5, I should be able to have that picture. Let's take a look at FujiXWeekly's site. They have recipes for hundreds of different film types. It would be super nice to be able to simply import one of those recipes into my camera, set a custom name and picture and have the same performance as the built in profiles. 

Fuji and Leica both have great ISO dials. They feel authentic and with purpose. From a dial perspective, I think Leica and Fuji nailed it on the head. It would be hard to improve upon either of their systems. 

Why are these features important? If a digital camera wants to mimic film at a not-so-affordable price (Leica) it had better mimic the great things about film and not just be anti-chimping. Both the Leica and the Fuji are mostly anti-chimping, Leica more so. If my goal is replicate film, then why not just shoot film? Film price and convenience. However, as an example with the Leica M-d Type 262, I could shoot and develop nearly 350 rolls of film at near equal cost to the camera body. Yet, the Leica M-d lacks so many features of film. Because of the missing features, it takes you out of the immersiveness of the experience and reminds you of the annoying limitations, rather than it's original purpose - to be one with photography.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I feel like these are small improvements. The clientele for film has been exponentially growing and users of the Fuji XPro-3 and Leica M-d Type 262 love the experience. If these small changes are made, it would create a new digital market for film and digital lovers. The current market experience isn't immersive enough to justify the cost for the high end and the lower end doesn't make it convenient and immersive. Both cameras pulling the photographer out of the experience. The Leica is a dumbed down version of the Leica M series and photographers find it difficult to understand the purpose of the limitation because there just isn't enough there to justify the cost. I think Leica is embarrassed of this camera because it's hard to even find proof of their acknowledgement of its existence. The M-d isn't in the Leica master book at my local camera store. Every other Leica camera is there, just not the M-d. Finding the M-d on the used market is nearly impossible, and not because it's considered a collector's item.

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