Fuji GFX100S
Medium-format cameras take incredible stills but weigh heavy on the nerd – so Sam Kieldsen swapped in Fuji’s new sub-1kg upstart for a physio-free fortnight
Medium-format, medium-pricey
DAY 01
Medium-format cameras aren’t known for their user-friendliness. Bulky, eye-wateringly expensive and rarely possessed of the planed-down niceties of a mirrorless, they’re traditionally tough to live with… but their giant sensors are capable of producing glorious photos.
Fujifilm’s latest GFX camera bucks the trend – well, mostly.
It’s compact and lightweight by medium-format standards and packed with features like in-body image stabilisation and fast, accurate phase-detection autofocus that make it operate like the company’s X-series mirrorless models.
Weighing 900g without a lens, the GFX100S is 500g lighter than the £10,000 flagship GFX100. It’s also much more compact thanks to a significantly lower height and a slimmer frame. The only real trade-off is the loss of the vertical battery grip – something we’d wager most people don’t really want anyway.
The grip would allow you to fit more batteries and hold it more steadily in a vertical orientation, so there are some advantages, but taking it outside to shoot 102MP images without feeling like you need a neck replacement afterwards is a huge deal. It’s still chunky, particularly with a GFX lens on, and weatherproof.
Like the GFX100, this new model has a 3.2in three-way tilting touchscreen on the back. It won’t flip fully forward, but will tilt slightly to the right as well as up and down. That flexibility is likely to be useful when the camera is set on a tripod, as it means you won’t have to stoop to compose shots. Vloggers will want a forward-flip screen, of course, but how many of them are considering a camera this big or expensive for documenting their ramble-chats?
There’s an electronic viewfinder too, and very nice it is, if not quite as sharp as the interchangeable viewfinder on the GFX100. Both cameras have a useful top-plate LCD panel, giving at-a-glance info on current settings even when the camera is powered down.