ON TRIAL FUJIFILM GFX100 II
When the GFX100 was launched at the 2018 Photokina – the last one ever as it’s turned out – it represented a whole bunch of digital medium format camera ‘firsts’… in addition to being the first 100 megapixels mirrorless digital medium format camera, of course. Notably, it was the first with in-body image stabilisation, the first with phase-different detection autofocusing (PDAF), the first with 4K video recording and the first with extended specifications such the ISO and shutter speed ranges. The sensor itself was a first too… the first BSI-type CMOS in the so-called “44×33” format.
The GFX100 II adds a few more ‘firsts’ for a digital medium format camera (well, let’s be honest, for any medium format camera) – 8.0 fps continuous shooting, subject-recognition modes for AF tracking, 8K video, 10-bit HEIF capture for stills, the highest-res EVF thus far, an even faster top shutter speed of 1/32,000 second and support for the super-fast CFexpress Type B memory cards. As we noted with the GFX100, it had “…pretty much everything you’d expect to find on a competitive full35mm or ‘APS-C’ mirrorless camera”. The same is true of the Mark II model, but five years later. Comparing features and specifications for both stills and video, the GFX100 II is essentially a 100 megapixels version of the X-H2… OK, 101.8 megapixels to be precise. It uses the same ‘X Processor 5’ engine – obviously tweaked to drive this particular camera – and Fujifilm has adopted a similar naming arrangement for the sensor which is called the ‘GFX 102MP CMOS II HS’. The imager’s basic specifications are unchanged from the GFX100 (and the GFX100S), but it is, in fact, completely new with a much faster read-out, a redesigned microlens array to improve sensitivity (by 30 percent Fujifilm says) and, of course, a set of pixels dedicated to PDAF. The imaging area is 43.8×32.9 mm (hence the ‘44×33’ tag) and the effective pixel count yields a maximum image size of 11,648×8736 pixels at the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. The pixel size is 3.76 microns which is the same, incidentally, as the 60 MP full frame sensor in the Sony A7R V, and so ensures a high signal-to-noise ratio. JPEGs and HEIFs can be captured in one of three image sizes and three compression levels while the RAW options comprise either 14-bit or 16-bit RGB colour depth and the choice of lossy or lossless compression or no compression at all. There’s a bunch of RAW+JPEG and RAW+HEIF combo settings and the incamera creation of 8-bit or 16-bit TIFFs converted in-camera from RAW files. There’s also RAW-to-HEIF and HEIF-to-JPEG (or TIFF) conversion options.
The sensor’s increased sensitivity drops the base ISO from 100 down to 80 – with the benefits of lower noise and a wider dynamic range – while the faster read-out and processor bump up the continuous shooting speed to 8.0
