GREAT AND SMALL
OK, so we need to talk about the elephant in the room. The Fujifilm GFX 50R is the elephant in the room. If you have only seen illustrations so far, then you’re probably picturing an X-Pro2 that’s been at the party pies. Nope, the GFX 50R is much, much bigger… brick-like, in fact. So much so, that the first encounter takes you a bit by surprise. Well… er… I was expecting something a bit… well, smaller. Be prepared. But then something remarkable happens… the more you use it, the smaller it gets. Not physically, of course, but perceptually because, for a digital medium format camera, it is actually pretty small. Park it alongside the mirrorless GFX 50S, on which it is largely based, and the 50R looks almost pocket-sized. Next to Phase One’s monster XF medium format D-SLR, it looks absolutely titchy. Purely by the numbers, right now the Fujifilm GFX 50R is the smallest, lightest and least expensive digital medium format camera on the market. It’s even way, way cheaper than the Leica M10 which, of course, is a real digital rangefinder camera, but with the, ahem, smaller full-35mm format sensor. Unlike the many and varied Fujifilm rollfilm rangefinder cameras from the past (see the separate history panel), the GFX 50R is a rangefinder-style camera complete with a contemporary electronic viewfinder, but there are still size-related benefits to be had from adopting this shape and configuration. And, consequently also, the 50R does look a lot like the X-Pro2, but with the inevitable increase in external dimensions when its sensor is 32.9x43.8 mm in size versus 15.6x23.5 mm.
“RIGHT NOW THE FUJIFILM GFX 50R IS THE SMALLEST, LIGHTEST AND LEAST EXPENSIVE DIGITAL MEDIUM FORMAT CAMERA ON THE MARKET.
With all the recent activity surrounding full-35mm mirrorless cameras – often called full-frame (although, technically, this actually means something else) – Fujifilm has cheekily adopted the term ‘super full-frame’ for its medium format models, emphasising that there’s around 1.7x more sensor area at play. Given the effective pixel count is 51.4 million, this means the pixel size is still a healthy 5.3 microns which gives a higher signal-to-noise ratio and all the image quality benefits that this brings, starting with a wider dynamic range… Fujifilm quotes 14 stops at ISO 100. As in the days of film, image quality remains the most compelling reason for moving up to medium format… in the digital era it enables you have both 50+ megapixels resolution bigger pixels. From an amateur perspective, it’s still a big investment even compared to a pro-level full-35mm mirrorless camera system and you need
