When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission. Photo: Richard Butler Despite having owned a Fujifilm camera for years, I'll admit I'd never really given much thought to the "recipes" that are loved by many of the brand's fans.
However, with the X-E5, the company has officially embraced them by letting you assign them to a slot on a physical dial, a change that's completely changed how I think about and use recipes.
What's a recipe?
Some background for those less familiar: many of Fujifilm's cameras have allowed you to adjust several parameters that affect how your JPEGs look. The changes, which are applied on top of a base film simulation (Fujifilm's term for its color modes), range from relatively subtle, like changes to sharpness or contrast, to more complex, like adding grain or a color chrome effect.
Anders Lindborg's HP5 recipe modifies Fujifilm's monochrome film simulation by adding grain and contrast while reducing sharpness and noise reduction.
Fujifilm X-E5 | Fujifilm XF 16mm F2. 8 | F2. 8 | 1/100 sec | ISO 1600
Photo: Mitchell Clark
For years, the Fujifilm community has found and shared certain combinations of these settings that create a distinctive look or emulate certain film stocks. You could save the recipes to a custom setting to somewhat quickly activate/deactivate them, but they've always been a byproduct of systems that Fujifilm builds into its cameras, not an intentionally supported feature.
Fujifilm has long had several image quality settings that let you change your JPEGs, but the X-E5 gives you three profiles to save them to as a custom recipe.
The X-E5 changes that. Like the X-M5 and X-T50 before it, it has a film simulation dial with custom slots. What's new, though, is that it lets you save not just standard film simulations to the dial, but actual recipes, which you can activate or deactivate on the fly depending on whether you want to use the base simulation or apply your custom changes to it. Fujifilm has adopted the terminology from its community and has added physical control to what used to be a bit of a workaround.
What does this change?
Even before working at DPReview, I was a heavy Fujifilm user. I own an X-T3 and have rented various other cameras for important shoots. But I never really played around with recipes; my thought was that if I were going to go through the hassle of tweaking a bunch of parameters and juggling settings, I might as well just do it in post where I had more flexibility anyway.
While that worked for me, the X-E5 has convinced me that I was missing out. As I've tested it, I've found myself having a lot of fun finding different recipes, picking favorites, and occasionally switching to them using the film simulation dial (a control I previously haven't personally used that much in cameras without the recipe feature). Instead of wondering, "What would this photo look like in black and white?" I've found myself saying, "I bet this shot would look really cool with Anders Lindborg's HP5 recipe, let me quickly switch over to that. " I've even challenged myself to shoot with a single recipe for the day, somewhat emulating the (slightly contentious) X half experience.
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This is, I imagine, how some people feel about the built-in film simulations, but those have never really done it for me. I've always stuck to one or two, as I haven't found the other dozen or so to my tastes. Recipes, by contrast, are available in the thousands, and I've been able to find several that I really enjoy and that achieve a wider range of looks.
Would I have given the recipe much thought if it weren't my job to test the X-E5? Maybe not, but I'm glad the review process has finally forced me to think about the system and use it. I've even gone as far as to program a few onto my X-T3 (for the rare occasions I still use it), though the experience isn't as smooth. I suspect I'll end up using them far less than I have with the X-E5, since I have to use up a valuable function button to bring up the custom setting switcher.
Related: Opinion: let me get my hands on the goodies
And that's always been the point, hasn't it? If you're a camera manufacturer and have a feature that makes you stand out from the crowd, you should make it impossible for people to miss. Sure, not everyone will appreciate it, but you may even win over some people who think they won't.
A few limitations
Despite all my praise, there are a few things that make me think that Fujifilm should've given its implementation of recipes just a bit more time in the oven. My biggest gripe is that you can't use saved recipes when reprocessing Raws like you can with the standard film simulations. Of course, the in-camera software does let you tweak all the same parameters on a photo-by-photo basis, but it'd be much nicer if you could tell it to use the recipe you'd saved to one of your FS slots.
It'd be nice if the in-camera converter could use a recipie you'd saved to one of the FS slots
The second is the process of adding the recipes themselves. While there is a new menu associated with the film simulation dial (which, helpfully, lets you quickly toggle your recipe changes on and off), actually setting up the recipe is largely the same process as it's always been: you find a list of the settings online, and manually input them.
The process of inputting a recipe may involve tweaking several parameters, a process that takes a bit of time, and that could be easy to mess up.
The X-E5 lets you adjust about a dozen parameters, so the process can actually take a bit of time, and there's room for error. In an age where Panasonic and Nikon let you browse color modes in their apps and beam them to your camera, it feels like there's probably a better way. If you could download popular recipes to your camera using Fujifilm's Xapp, it'd be an even bigger invitation to experiment with them.
A few smaller nitpicks: the custom "FS" settings on the film simulation dials are just text, which looks dull in comparison to the official film simulation ones, which have a little film canister icon. I also wish you could name and store recipes like you can with the custom settings.
At the end of the day, though, those limitations are relatively minor, and Fujifilm could theoretically improve the system through updates to its app and firmware. For a version one, it's quite well-considered, and it's nice to finally see Fujifilm fully-embracing a fan-favorite feature. . . and maybe earning some new fans in the process.
As for how the system fits into the X-E5, and how the camera performs as a whole, stay tuned for our full review.
. dpreview.com2025-7-23 16:00