Choosing a camera to pack for a spontaneous train trip sounds simple until you realize your heavier kit is the reason you leave it at home. The Fujifilm GFX100RF sits in an unusual position: 100 megapixels, medium format, and small enough to slip into a daypack without a second thought.
Coming to you from Jason Friend Photography, this candid video follows Friend on an unplanned day out across northern England, where he picks up a secondhand VW van near Blackburn and squeezes in a landscape shoot at Ribblehead Viaduct in the Yorkshire Dales on the way home. Friend had been seriously weighing whether to sell the GFX100RF, not because the camera underperforms, but because it's expensive and sits unused when he's shooting work assignments with his Sony FX2. The trip ended up making the case for keeping it. Traveling by train with no car, no assistant, and a bag that also needed to hold a laptop forced the kind of gear decision that reveals what a camera is actually worth to you.
The core tension Friend works through is whether the GFX100RF has a wide enough role in a working photographer's kit to justify its price. His comparison point is his Fujifilm GFX 50S, which he would normally pair with the GF 35-70mm and a wide angle lens. That combination gets heavy fast, and on a train trip with a lot of walking, he simply wouldn't have brought it. The GFX100RF went in the bag without a second thought. At Ribblehead, he shoots on a lightweight Benro tripod with a KF Concept 10-stop ND filter, working at f/11, 30 seconds, ISO 200, using the limestone pavement as foreground interest with the viaduct in the distance.
Where the video gets genuinely useful is Friend's breakdown of who this camera is and isn't for. He's part of a GFX100RF Facebook group and has noticed the camera gets resold constantly. His read on why: people are drawn to the idea of a 100-megapixel compact without fully thinking through the fixed 45mm lens, the storage demands of those files, or what it means to crop the sensor and work with the equivalent of a 28mm to 60mm full frame range. His view is shifting on the sensor crop question too, and his reasoning is worth hearing directly. Whether the GFX100RF belongs in your bag comes down to a specific question he asks toward the end of the video. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Friend.
3 Comments
It's definitely an all around outstanding camera. Probably a bit overkill for travel photography. The only thing really holding this camera back is the extreme cost of the camera itself, and it's lenses. Medium format is just out of reach for the everyday photographer, making it reserved for only the "well off."
It needed to have ibis. Probably a faster aperture too, but I know size matters so they can have a pass there. But the omission of ibis is not good. 100mp sensor going to show every bit of movement.
Also lens isn't fixed at 45mm, it's 35mm.
As a GFX user I was intrigued by this camera. I own two GFX cameras and I'm a big fan of their cameras even though they are bulky so this did appeal but having held one and tried it for about two hours. I decided to go with a leica Q3 as my travel camera.... But I think this is a great camera and I do think version two will be better. I think stabilisation was probably required and potentially a better lens. They do make a GFX 45 2.8 which is a little bit bulky but I think they could've got it down. It's a big reason why I bought the Q3 because the lens is so much better than the GFX lens.