Is Old Fuji Color Better? Or Even Different?

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

This just came up in another thread, and has often come up in the past - People going on about how much better the color was from the older sensor cameras, especially the X-Trans 1 models. All but one of these are SOOC jpegs (a couple with a teeny brightness adjustment, and the higher res. images were down-scaled so they are all consistent in those respects). Do they really look that different to you?

It seems to me that "Fuji Color" really hasn't changed much at all over the years, the differences here are quite subtle to my eyes.. I suspect that the differences in color that people see between cameras mostly has to do with exposure and Auto-WB discrepancies. I don't think the color profiles have changed much, if at all.

Can you tell which image is from which camera? Do you have a preference? The images below are from the - X-Pro1, Xpro2, X-E1, X-E2, X-T1, and a RAW conversion from the X-T2 with a custom profile to match the X-T1 SOOC jpeg.

<snip the test scenes>

I find most test scenes are pretty poor for judging colors. They tend to go for very vibrant, pure colors. Especially that test scene.

Objects with subtle variations in hue and in more neutral palettes would be better. Like - why not include a few wood blocks of different sorts? That would much more closely simulate human skin tones.

Color swatches are great in that you can go to a store and buy them yourself, but being such vibrant hues it's a bit too easy to match - all the colors are on the outside of the HSV wheel. What about all the colors on the inside?

I've tested the X-Pro1 vs X-Pro2 on humans and posted the results here. You can judge for yourself. I chose Astia as more subtle than Provia, and I didn't see much difference in Pro-Neg Hi.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4493802

Also check out the first thread in my sig, which has a more complete set of Fuji JPGs (vs other cameras too).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV

It's easy to get colors to match on the outside of the HSV wheel, large changes in tonality can get you there. But what about the colors on the inside of the HSV wheel? Those large changes can have outsized effects on the inner colors.