Fujifilm just dropped a major hint about future lenses. As a Fujifilm photographer, I couldn’t be more excited about the possibility for more pancake lenses

The viral success of the Fujifilm X100VI bled through category lines and boosted the popularity of another one of the brand’s products: Pancake lenses. But the popularity of lenses like the tiny 23mm f/2.8 that launched alongside the X-E5 hasn’t gone unnoticed – and Fujifilm executives just dropped a major hint about the company’s plans for future optics.

During the CP+ show in Japan, French photo publication Phototrend interviewed three Fujifilm executives, and among the wealth of different insights from the interview, Fujifilm dropped some hints on the future of lenses, including the potential for more pancakes and more compact lenses overall.

“In addition to the consistently strong sales of the 27mm, the new 23mm is also selling well. The combination of a pancake lens and the camera body creates a very elegant package. We therefore believe there is potential for a future range of pancake lenses,” Jun Watanabe, the head of product planning for the X series, said in the interview (translated by Google).

While Watanabe doesn’t come right out and say that there’s another pancake lens coming, the Fujifilm executive hints that the 23mm and 27mm are doing so well that there’s potential for a wider range of tiny pancake lenses in the future.

The interview offers one more hint as to what focal lengths those futuristic pancakes could be: “I think that to maintain a compact format, a shorter focal length is more suitable,” Watanabe said. “Therefore, there is potential to develop a new lens in the wide-angle range.”

Pancakes aren’t the only category of optics that Fujifilm is shrinking. When the French publication asked what’s the most important for a second-generation lens, Watanabe had three words: “Size and performance.”

Fujifilm’s Head of Marketing Shugo Kiryu explained a little more in-depth. “Generally speaking, for any version II, the impact should be felt across the board: improved image quality, better performance, and a smaller size. Since the X series philosophy is based on portability, reducing size and weight is always a key objective for us.”

Fujifilm’s pancake lenses are a way to make the brand’s mirrorless more compact without sacrificing the ability to swap lenses. When I took the 23mm f/2.8 R WR on a trip last year with the X-E5, I nearly forgot that I wasn’t using a compact camera.

As a Fujifilm photographer, I’d be happy to see more pancakes join the X lens lineup. The price of a pancake lens is far more palatable than buying the X100VI for photographers who already have a camera body.

The one feature that I missed the most on the 23mm was the f/1.8 aperture Fujifilm offers on larger wide-angle lenses, so if I could make one request, it would be for a pancake with a wider aperture. Cramming a wide aperture into a pancake lens is extremely difficult to do, however, so I don’t expect something with a wider aperture to be quite pancake-level compactness.

But, in Fujifilm’s ongoing survey asking photographers to vote on the glass they’d like to see come to the X system, there’s an XF 18mm and 30mm listed among the options. The poll shows a rather compact, though not quite pancake, silhouette with a “Travel Mini” label, so size is clearly a focus. Fujifilm doesn’t mention the aperture in the poll – but a photographer can always hope, right?

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