A year with the Fujifilm GFX100 II can either make you fall in love with stills again or make you regret every storage decision you’ve ever made. The video lays out the real tradeoffs of living with a 102-megapixel medium format body when you’re shooting work, not just testing it for an afternoon.
Coming to you from Samuel Elkins, this candid video treats the Fujifilm GFX100 II like a daily tool instead of a trophy. Elkins starts with the obvious draw: files that hold together when you zoom in, crop hard, and still expect skin and texture to look natural. He talks about how the color comes through in a way that feels finished sooner, especially if you like earth tones and coastal palettes. He also frames image quality as more than sharpness, pointing to depth, highlight rolloff, and how forgiving the files are when you pull shadows and tame bright areas. You get a sense of why people buy into this system, and why some people bounce off it fast.
The more useful part is where Elkins stops romanticizing the sensor and talks about speed, because that’s where older bodies can quietly wreck your day. If you’ve used a Fujifilm GFX100S or even something like a Fujifilm GFX50R, you already know the “medium format is slow” stereotype has some truth in it. Elkins argues the GFX100 II changes the feel more than the look, mostly because it finally leans into a faster pipeline with a CFexpress Type B slot. Less waiting means you can actually shoot sequences when someone is walking toward you, turning, laughing, or doing anything that would have blown past your buffer on older setups. He gives specific use cases like lifestyle movement and occasional sports, while still drawing a hard line against true high-speed action work.
Elkins also touches autofocus improvements in plain terms: subject tracking and eye detection exist now, they work well at typical portrait distances, and they get less reliable when the subject is small in the frame. That’s a practical way to think about it if you’re coming from full frame bodies that seem to lock onto anything with a pulse. He compares the experience to faster cameras without pretending it’s a sports flagship, which is the kind of honesty you want before spending close to $8,000 on a body. He briefly brings up how the same batteries work across other Fujifilm bodies like the Fujifilm X-H2S and the Fujifilm X-T5, which matters if you already run Fujifilm and don’t want a separate charging ecosystem. There’s also a quick mention of smaller-sensor alternatives like the Fujifilm X100VI, mainly to underline what medium format adds beyond Fujifilm’s usual color.
Where the video gets dangerously real is workflow. Elkins names file sizes that can jump past 200 MB per photo if you shoot 16-bit uncompressed raw, and he’s clear that most days he lands on lossless compressed files closer to 100 to 130 MB. That choice alone changes how you shoot bursts, how you cull, and how fast your drives fill, especially if you keep full jobs archived. He talks about upgrading his computer and leaning on big external storage, not as a flex, but as the cost of entry that nobody puts in the headline. He also hints at the kind of shooting where the camera pays you back: light with bite, heavy contrast, texture, and scenes where you want room to steer the final look later. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Elkins.
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