Good Day Flexers.
Well, it is related somehow to photography, otherwise I would not bother you...
Recently I received a message from the FujiFilm Club in France for the new
firmwares of various cameras, Fujirumors.com had already given the news away.
But hey, it's from my 'club', French Snobs!
For the Fuji X20 I own, it's a portable compact P&S, fun, a "look alike" Leica
III, I dowloaded the firmware (update version N) and managed to find the
previous update, (version N-1).
Now, a couple of word about "beyond compare" it's a powerful tool we use at the
jobsite to check out various files.
And of course, I have compared both firmware updates. They come in binary
format but "hexadecimal" does not put me off, I have it for breakfast :)
Here comes the most interesting (in my opinion), the two files have différences
spread all over. And I thought it was just a minor tweak for Windows 10 USB
management, I hoped to find a few constants modified at the begining and
probably a localised mod somewhere in the middle.
Instead, I could see that some values were modified, sprinkled all over, a 0x10
becomes a 0x80 or 0x0d becomes 0x0b and so on, , minor moves.
Often the values come in group of 16 bits. As most of the intelligence is se in
a SOC with a micro code written in VHDL with a 32 or 64 bits cpu, the main
processor for displaying the menus, read the buttons needs to be a workhorse, a
16 bits is enough (there is a good Toshiba range of microcontrollers)
My guess is that the update has modified, improved probably, some parameters to
offer better images. As the core of the solution shares common parts with other
Fuji X series, it is a Library all together.
At the end, I have updated my camera. And Fujifilm can put all the mods they
want, afterall, I trust them to be competent and I bought their product. If
they don't want to disclose a few corrected bugs, well, reading from the net
comments, I lean toward their mind: the users are really ignorant of the
trade......IMHO
I wanted to conduct a comparison of both firmwares for the XE2, another model
of Fujifilm but the 'old' firmware seems to be erased from the net.
Hmmm, that's a rather long post for something OT. Have a nice WE.
#-----------------------------------
From : Xavier F. BILLE
mail : hot_billexf@xxxxxxxxxxx
Maisons Alfort - France
