Materials

As our lives become more affluent, environmental issues like climate change are becoming more serious on a global scale. In order to achieve sustainable development in the future, the world must balance economic activities with solutions to environmental issues. How can we reduce the environmental impact in order to realize a more eco-friendly society? In addition to pursuing energy efficiency and introducing renewable energy in the life cycle of our products, we are working to solve environmental issues through various products and services. For example, magnetic tape technology is used for safe, long-term storage of the vast amount of digital data that continues to increase today. Most digital data is stored on servers, but as power consumption of data centers increases worldwide, reducing CO2 emissions has become a pressing issue. Fujifilm has developed long-life, high-capacity magnetic tapes as a means of backing up and archiving this enormous amount of digital data that continues to grow around the world. Since magnetic tape does not require a constant power supply, it contributes to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions from data centers.

With an ever-expanding global datasphere at stake – from your personal photo library to the data that empowers the world’s largest companies – Fujifilm will never stop revolutionizing the way digital information is secured.

Leveraging over 80 years of expertise in photographic film, Fujifilm pioneered the use of Barium Ferrite combined with modern nanotechnology. And further innovation has led us to the development of palm-sized high-density magnetic tape with a massive 400TB capacity. Featuring more than 50 years of archival life* and the lowest energy consumption of any storage media, it’s the most reliable, economical and eco-friendly way to secure data.

And today, these tapes support the world’s largest cloud storage service providers. Fujifilm will never stop innovating for tomorrow, preserving digital content for future generations.

• *1 Archival life based on internal acceleration testing.

Through strategic investments and continuous innovation, our state-of-the-art facilities around the world now provide high-purity electronic materials and critical supply chain assurance for the industry.

Our products enable enhanced functionality, performance efficiency and miniaturization of the integrated circuitry behind everything from data centers to mobile devices, and 5G to automotive electronics.

We will NEVER STOP supporting the technology that drives our digital society.

Drawing on our 80 years of innovative experience, we are continuing to contribute to the development of display materials.

Fujifilm is adapting the technologies it has perfected in the photographic field over the years to provide ‘highly-functional films’ which are used in a wide range of liquid crystal displays including LCD televisions and smart phones.

If the light from the backlight is unable to pass straight to a liquid crystal display, it is impossible to project clear and attractive pictures. This necessitates a polarizing plate. But the polarizing plate also requires a polarizing plate protection film (a cellulose triacetate, or TAC, film). Worldwide, Fujifilm is one of a handful of companies possessing the advanced technology required for manufacturing these films, and enables the company to produce the popular Fujitac film.

In the 1990s, Fujifilm developed its Wide View (WV) film, which is now widely used in liquid crystal displays. WV film enables viewers to almost double their viewing angle for liquid crystal displays, and see clear, beautiful pictures even when viewed diagonally.^*2 Today, our WV film is also in widespread use in monitors for personal computers.

We have also developed a touch-panel sensor film called EXCLEAR that uses silver-halide photographic technology. Compared to the indium tin oxide (ITO) film that has been used to date, EXCLEAR possesses properties that enable quick response time even on large size panels, strong resistance to folding or bending, and three-dimensional processing.

Our display technologies are opening the way to a clearer, brighter future. We are determined to continue producing new display materials, and this is why we will never stop transforming the ways we see the world.

• *2 When using TN mode liquid crystal displays

Drawing on our 80 years of innovative experience, we are continuing to contribute to the development of display materials.

Fujifilm is adapting the technologies it has perfected in the photographic field over the years to provide ‘highly-functional films’ which are used in a wide range of liquid crystal displays including LCD televisions and smart phones.

If the light from the backlight is unable to pass straight to a liquid crystal display, it is impossible to project clear and attractive pictures. This necessitates a polarizing plate. But the polarizing plate also requires a polarizing plate protection film (a cellulose triacetate, or TAC, film). Worldwide, Fujifilm is one of a handful of companies possessing the advanced technology required for manufacturing these films, and enables the company to produce the popular Fujitac film.

In the 1990s, Fujifilm developed its Wide View (WV) film, which is now widely used in liquid crystal displays. WV film enables viewers to almost double their viewing angle for liquid crystal displays, and see clear, beautiful pictures even when viewed diagonally.^*3 Today, our WV film is also in widespread use in monitors for personal computers.

We have also developed our EXCLEAR touch-panel sensor film that uses silver-halide photographic technology. Compared to the indium tin oxide (ITO) film that has been used to date, EXCLEAR film possesses properties that enable quick response time even on large size panels, strong resistance to folding or bending, and three-dimensional processing.

Our display technologies are opening the way to a clearer, brighter future. We are determined to continue producing new display materials, and this is why we will never stop transforming the ways we see the world.

• *3 When using TN mode liquid crystal displays

Our image analysis technology, which utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI), helps engineers detect cracks on bridges, tunnels and other vital infrastructure, saving them valuable time and energy.

Over time, Japan’s bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure have aged. To ensure safety, the national and municipal governments have mandated regular close visual inspections of all social infrastructure. However, there are just too many structures for the current number of engineers to inspect. To date, infrastructure inspections have required advanced technologies, experienced and skilled engineers to inspect each structure by eye, and indicate each crack by chalking a line by the side of it. They were then required to sketch each crack or fissure, trace the entire image, then make digital images and include them in reports.

As there is such a large number of sites to inspect, and given the amount of time required for inspections due to a lack of skilled engineers, making the process more efficient has become a pressing issue. To resolve this social issue, we developed an image analysis service that utilizes AI.

We have applied our existing medical image analysis technology, which automatically extracts parts of blood vessel from images, to the detection and visualization of cracks in structures. This development made it necessary to train a computer to learn from vast amounts of image data in order to accurately detect chalking and cracks in structures. So we traveled to sites across Japan, listened to the views of inspection companies and construction consulting companies, collected an enormous amount of images and data of cracks, and continued developing our technology.

This resulted in the creation of our Social Infrastructure Image Analysis Service, which can be used easily by anyone. This service has reduced the required amount of time for inspections by half, and is playing a vital role in supporting inspection engineers nationwide.

We will never stop developing and further evolving the technologies we originally created for the photographic field to make the world a safer place!

Our digital printing presses have solved this issue. By utilizing the technology for uniformly applying a photosensitive layer cultivated through the production of photographic film, a high-speed, high-precision print head that ejects as many as five billion ink particles per second, and unique technology to prevent ink blur, we have achieved the same quality as offset printing, including a wider range of color expression and smoother gradation, which were previously impossible to reproduce with digital printing.

In addition to offset printing, we will continue to provide a wide range of products, technologies and solutions in digital printing by balancing high quality and cost.

To move people's hearts and inspire them, our mission is to support the creation of as much diverse content as possible, from everyday printed matter to those with valuable historical, cultural, and social value. Fujifilm's technologies play an indispensable role in these efforts.

In the world such as inkjet printheads, inks, print system, where manufacturers jostle with each other for position, we leverage the many decades of experience and innovation we have accrued, and continue to lead the world in the development of inkjet technologies for products and industrial such as textile and packaging.

Inkjet technologies are technologies that have the potential to revolutionize and pioneer the futures of a wide range of industries.

With the ability to either leverage our individual or integrated capabilities, we are one of the few total manufacturers in the world.

This is because, along with having the ability to steadily and reliably supply advanced inkjet technologies, another of our strong points is being able to develop all aspects of our technologies in-house, from Fujifilm Group inkjet printheads through to inks and image processing systems.

There are many more things we want to accomplish in this field. That is why we will never stop pursuing further advancements to inkjet technologies and bringing positive changes to the world around us.

The broadcasting industry demands the very highest levels of functionality and quality.
As camera crews need to be able to change focus in each scene, they require cameras and lenses that are easy to use with high levels of operability. The digital revolution has brought about great advances in image quality, and this has resulted in an increasing demand for even higher definition lenses. Since we began developing broadcast lenses in the 1960s, we have always striven to develop, produce and supply lenses that respond to user demands.

In 2015, we released our UA series, which became the first ever 4K zoom lenses used for broadcasting. When developing this lens, we joined camera crews on set and listened closely to their requirements. We received much support from the crews themselves when developing the lenses, and the lenses have been adopted by broadcasting companies around the world, firms that specialize in live transmissions and film production companies. Not only did this new, revolutionary lens set new standards for lenses, but also engendered a revolution in the world of imaging, contributing to the success and proliferation of 4K contents.

Now, we have also succeeded in developing 8K broadcasting lenses in response to demands for even higher quality images. This lens has been the focus of much attention in the broadcasting world, and there are high hopes that it will play a significant role in the expansion of 8K broadcasting.
We will never stop providing the world with even higher resolution and higher definition images.

We have adapted the technologies we have accumulated in the photographic field to build porous yeast filters with holes one-millionth of an inch in diameter. This technology is assisting brewers to filter more yeast and bacteria to deliver tastier, high-quality beer.

We are continuing to take on the challenge of providing consumers with better-tasting beer.

Photographic film technologies have always been at the core of our business, and over many years, we have applied these technologies to a wide range of uses. In the case of beer, we found that the technology we use to create microscopic holes in photographic film works very well to create filters for yeast. Previously, in order to prevent a reduction in the quality of beer, the yeast was usually heat-treated. However, using micro filters guarantees the complete removal of yeast and bacteria from the beer without the need for heat treatment, and enables the production of draft beer. This has not only helped ensure that delicious draft-quality beer is available in cans and bottles, but also helped home brewers enjoy tasty craft beers.

Of course, we didn’t stop there. This technology, which has the ability to filter the minutest of particles, is currently being used in various industrial production plants to filter out foreign bodies in the water used in cleansing processes for liquid crystal displays and HDD (hard disk drives), as well as in chemical filtration for plating solutions.

We will never stop evolving our core technologies to help make the world a better place.