Fujifilm GFX-100: Review Coming Soon
Related: digital sensor, Fujifilm, Fujifilm GFX100, Fujifilm medium format, Fujifilm mirrorless, Hasselblad, Hasselblad medium format, James K, Jason W, medium format, Multi-Shot High Resolution Mode
Busy day, and so I am behind, but I have a new crown for the disintegrated molar.
Update: I expect th GFX-100 in mid July.
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I’m hoping that the Fujifilm GFX-100 I have on order (loaner) ships out tomorrow for arrival Monday. Because I’ll be spending half my day enjoying my four damaged front teeth being ground down for temporary crowns. So I hope to have one bright spot for the day.
No Panasonic S1R style Multi-Shot High-Res mode in the GFX-100 is a bummer, but maybe Fujifilm can fix that in firmware?
My min concern is the omission of a 4-way joystick. Do I have what follows wrong and that tiny little butotn abouve AE-L is a 4-way controller (without 4 way buttons)?
Touchscreen operation is worse than worthless in so many situations, so I hope that little button does not remove the scrolling functionality, namely, forcing the use of a touchscreen requires:
- Taking the camera away from shooting position and holding it out from the body, shifting hand position.
- Taking gloves off.
- Greasing up the screen with sweat or sunblock and it won’t even work with damp hands (my iPhone doesn’t)
- Near-range vision which is physically impossible for me in dim light
- No ability to shoot handheld while using touch.
Maybe some guy or gal in a studio with this brick on a tripod and perfect 20/20 close-range (no presbyopia) vision will love touchscreen operation. For me, it’s a clusterfuck.
I wonder how the small-button ergonomics will fare, particularly for cold weather shooting. I have two hands and this imbalanced buttons-on-the right thing bugs me—with that big a body, I just don't get so many buttons have to all be on the right and too small—it forces me to grab the camera with the left hand and reposition my right hand out of shooting-ready position.
As I discussed in my four-part series Maximize Image Quality with Shot Discipline articles at Medium Format Magazine, perfect shot execution and outstanding lenses are going to be needed for the extremely high pixel density of a 100 megapixel 44 X 33mm sensor. Along with focus stacking.
Bottom line though is image quality. Carrying a big brick can be worth it if the images are the reward as the Hasselblad H6D-100C showed me, and the GFX-100 surely is much more manageable—but with a much smaller sensor. It is primarily on the basis of image quality that I will be evaluating it.
James K writes:
The Fuji GFX-100 looks like a brick. With pixel shift or Multi-Shot High-Res mode they could have had a more appealing camera.
The smell of a Sony with a Global Shutter is in the wind. This Fall and Winter will tell the tale. The Sony Bear might leave the others like picked clean bones in Yellowstone with no meat for the wolves.
DIGLLOYD: no one should count Sony out, and it makes me hesitate to buy anything right now. Still, if I were just shooting landscape, the appeal of high-grade Zeiss or other lenses on the Panasonic S1R with Multi-Shot High-Res mode is compelling.
Jason W writes:
Enhance Details might not be killer app for the GFX 100S the way it was for the 50R/S. As you point out, many of the GF lenses will fail to out-resolve the sensor which means there just won't be much for Enhance Details to do in terms of recovering aliased detail. The difference may end up truly being nothing.
DIGLLOYD: some of the Fujifilm GF lenses are very sharp and all are sharp in the center, and thus color moiré and spurious detail issues might remain in the strong areas. But for several of the lenses, weak outer zones coupled with the damaging effects of distortion correction means capture of “higher resolution blur”.
However, I saw little benefit when processing Hasselblad H6D-100C and probably because of what Jason mentions: the lenses not being good enough to cause the usual optical issues—and the Fujifilm GFX-100 has far smaller pixels which means its lenses have to be better than the Hasselblad HCD lenses to incur isseus.
