THE GFX SERIES CAMERAS have very much blurred the distinction between medium format and the smaller formats. During the film era, 120 rollfilm SLRs were very different from the contemporary 35mm models – the uptake of automation was decades behind and they were mostly slow and/or clunkily cumbersome. The main advantages were image quality and, er, image quality. Right from the start, the GFX cameras have really only differed from the higher-end full frame models – and, in the case of Fujifilm, its high-end ‘APS-C’ bodies – in the size of their sensors. The technologies, functionality and efficiencies are on a par. In fact, anybody using the current X-T5 or X-H2/H2S ‘APS-C’ would have no problems switching over to the GFX100 or GFX100S or, even less so, to the most recent addition to the 102 megapixels line, the GFX100 II.
The original GFX100 introduced in body image stabilisation, phase-different detection autofocusing (PDAF) and 4K video recording (among a number of things) to the digital medium format camera world.
The GFX100 II adds a few more; namely 8.0 fps continuous shooting, subject-recognition modes for AF tracking, 8K video, 10-bit HEIF capture for stills, the highest-res EVF seen thus far, an even faster top shutter speed of 1/32,000 second and support for the super-fast CFexpress Type B memory cards. Consequently, it’s pretty much a medium format version of the X-H2. It uses the same ‘X Processor 5’ engine – although obviously tweaked to drive this particular camera – and Fujifilm has adopted a similar naming arrangement for the sensor 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 43.8x32.9 mm (a.k.a. ‘44x33’) and the effective pixel count yields a maximum image size of 11,648x8736 pixels at the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. The pixel size is 3.76 microns, which is the same as the 60 MP full frame sensor in the Sony A7R V, and so ensures a higher 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 depths 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 in-camera 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 fps. This the fastest that any medium format camera has been able to run and obviously a lot of data
