Fujifilm announced this September two new medium format mirrorless cameras, in the midst of a flurry of mirrorless camera announcements from Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, and Zeiss leading up to and at Photokina in Cologne. There was also the significant upgrade by Fuji with the X-T3. No doubt with these announcements there will be an avalanche of competition and further innovation.
A camera is an instrument through which one creates, and that instruments capacity can impact your creations. So every time there is a significant change you are drawn in to see what it might offer, but unlike a painter, it is not a matter of a better pigment, glaze, brush or medium it is a camera is a complex and expensive instrument.
So what follows is an exploration of an instrument that has caught my eye in the middle of all these announcements, the GFX 50R, although the Z7 and X-T3 were also quite interesting.

Fuji Guys – FUJIFILM GFX 50R – First Look

Two Mirrorless Medium Format Cameras

Currently, there are only two medium format cameras on the market, and when you look at them both with their 50mm equivalent lens, you can see the Fujifilm GFX 50s has a more substantial body massing compared to the Hasselblad X1D. The Hasselblad, on the other hand, has a very slim body but with the leaf shutter in the lens a much larger lens. So both are larger in different ways, and both are quite expensive.

Hasselblad X1D with 65mm lens and Fujifilm GFX 50S with 63mm lens.

The GFX 50R, which will be available in November, and the X1D will be at that time the smallest medium format cameras on the market. In the comparison below you can see that the massing of the Fujifilm camera is reduced, and the EVF bump has been removed and placed permanently into the body. What follows are the advantages I now see with this particular.

Ease of Operation

The 50R, unlike the X1D, has the aperture adjustments on its lenses, a speed dial, a compensation dial, and an ISO dial option, whereas the X1D is more of a minimalist camera more dependent on its touchscreen for its operation. Personally shooting with manual dials is more pleasurable and allows me to stay focused on the image in the EVF. So the camera seems to melt more into the background so I can concentrate on what I am trying to capture, this was my experience when I moved from a Nikon full frame camera to a Fujifilm camera.

X1D compared to the GFX 50R

X1D compared to the GFX 50R

One thing that might not be obvious when looking at the dials is the “top command dial.” This dial, located around the shutter button, can be programmed but comes defaulted as an ISO dial a feature I would have loved to have seen on my XPro-2. You may also notice that the “selector” buttons have been removed from the back, making it similar to the more modern touchscreen design of the X-E3. This last change allows the thumb to reset is an area where there are no function buttons that can accidentally be depressed, hopefully making the camera more comfortable to hold and operate. The remaining rear function buttons remain in an easy to reach thumb sweep that I often do while looking through the EVF and composing. The manual focus switch has been moved to the rear of the camera, a useful modification as I would be less likely to forget to return it to my preferred default after using it and it becomes easier to switch while operating the camera.

Street Friendly

Owning both the X-100T and XPro2 I am familiar with how much easier it is to “street” a rangefinder style camera, so I am hoping that this camera even though it is considerably larger might still be less conspicuous than the DSLR. I have personally found that the general public seems to have a more negative reaction to a DSLR style camera. Perhaps the size or for some reason a DSLR looks more commercial or official.

X-Pro 2 compared to the GFX 50R

Lens Quality

Fujifilm’s G Lens Road Map

Moving from either APS-C or full frame to medium format is going to result in working with a different depth of field, and here I am unclear as to how this might impact the various things I photograph. I can see two possible outcomes. It could be problematic for me and get in the way of what I am capturing, or it could introduce me to a whole new experience and aesthetic that will be thoroughly enjoyable. In this area, I am unclear whether or not this will be an advantage. One reviewer has suggested that if f/4 to f/5.6 gives you a depth of field you enjoy in APS-C on a GFX camera the equivalent depth of field is at f/11 or f/16.

It seems you can not get away from a personal review of the “pros and cons,” so here is my take with the following caveats: I don’t shoot video, primarily manual focus, shy away from IBIS, and don’t often use studio lighting. 

1. Smaller and lighter than the GFX 50S and all other medium format cameras except the Hasselblad X1D.
2. Cheapest medium format camera on the market
3. It has shutter speed, and exposure compensation dials, aperture rings on lenses and a programmable dial near the shutter defaulted to ISO.
4. USB-C is good
5. Dual type 2 SD card slots
6. Weather sealed 
7. Bluetooth which will include the ability to provide GPS locations directly into the metadata. 
8. Bayer sensor eliminates XTrans issues with processing software.
9. Announced 40mm equivalent pancake lens might be a good match if the IQ is there. 
10. 420 contrast focus points
11. Capture One full integrated support through a joint agreement.

1. Three frames per second is a real limitation for exposure bracketing add works against exposure merging practices and panorama creation.
2. Video no 4K, soft, single mic port, no headphone port so not a video camera
3. No phase detect focus.
4. No IBIS or image stabilization
5. The grip is small, but with the four-way, controller removed this may be ok.
6. 1/125 flash sync limits its value somewhat for use with studio lighting.
7. It has an ageing sensor this sensor is now almost five years old so not state-of-the-art anymore, and in four more years it will be closing in on a decade.
8. The Fuji GFX 100 MPx a much newer sensor will be available in less than a year, with IBIS, phase detection, 4k video and likely more.
9. Lack of IBIS means no possibility of pixel shift.

Resolution and Aspect Ratio

The resolution of the GFX 50R is 50 mp compared to the Nikon Z7 at 46mp and the Sony A7RIII at 42mp, but you have to keep in mind that the aspect ratio of the GFX is 4 to 3 and the aspect ration of the Z7 and A7RIII is 3 to 2. So if you are not happy with the squarish look of 4 to 3, which I am not, you are likely to crop it to a more rectangular form. There are good reasons to do this, as a 3 to 2 ratio is much closer to the golden ratio as are 5/3, 8/5 or 2/1. However, to crop an image into such a ratio, you would need to enter 1.618 by one into your Lightroom cropping tool, and such a crop would result in a 42mp file giving you the same resolution as the A7RIII and 4mp less than the Nikon Z7.

Golden Ratio

Phi Grid Example, courtesy of Mihir Patkar

So why would you crop like this? Compositionally the Golden Ratio is more appealing to the eye, and when using the golden lines to compose the image, this should result in a more pleasing composition. You can see from the above example of that this ratio produces a Phi Grid, much different from the rule of thirds often used by photographers when considering the framing compositional elements into a 3/2 ratio. The image below shows this composition has been cropped to a 1 x 6.18 ratio. I think that it is a more pleasing aspect ratio.

The Previous Image Cropped to 1 x 1.618

Capture One

Capture one is now compatible all Fujifilm and Sony cameras, including the GFX the first medium format camera other than Phase One to be included in this professional photograph processing program. There is also an Express version made explicitly for Fujifilm as well as Sony. Unfortunately, the Express version is subscription based. The Pro version is the only one where you can either buy a subscription or a perpetual license.
Capture one has many advantages over Lightroom, and the two key ones are the more sophisticated tethering method and highlights and shadow recovers better dynamic range recovery than Lightroom. Bin Putney’s article in SLR Lounge suggest one can attempt to approximate Capture One’s adjustments to highlights and shadows in Lightroom but doing so adversely affects the rest of the image.
Lightroom, of course, has a broader consumer base making it more accessible, and there are far more tutorials and people around who can help one understand its nuances. Lightroom has also done a better job integrating the program with mobile devices, cloud services, and third-party plugins. Capture One is even less intuitive than Lightroom and harder to master, despite the basic adjustments being much the same.
Capture One lists many other advantages on their website: levels where you can set black point for each channel colour, dynamic range adjustments for mid-tones, masking, layers, curves in each layer, Luma curve which only affects lumination, the ability make specific colour adjustments (for example a variety of reds can be isolated and adjusted), their editable colour profiles and remote camera controls during tethering.

Example of colour isolation editing in Capture One, courtesy of Alexander Svet

Size Comparison with other Cameras

Fujifilm GFX 50R, 50mp; Canon 5DSR, 51mp; Sony A99 II 42mp, and Nikon D850, 45mp

High-Resolution Mirrorless Camera Comparison

A more appropriate high-resolution comparison would be to compare the GFX to other mirrorless high-resolution cameras like the Nikon Z7 and the Sony A7RIII, here the lenses may be somewhat similar, but the body mass of the GFX is more significant. Interestingly enough if you include the viewfinder bump in measuring the height measurement all three cameras are similar in height.

Fujifilm GFX 50R, Sony A7RIII, and Nikon Z7

High Pixel Pitch Camera Comparison

Pixel pitch influences the sensor’s ability to accurately recreate colour, reduce noise, and operate effectively in low light. So this comparison is between full frame cameras with the highest pixel pitch. I have excluded older models and the D5 and 1DX, from and select. The best three cameras with high pixel pitches are the Sony A7sII with a pixel pitch of 8.40 µm, the Nikon Df at 7.28 µm, and the Leica 10 at 6 µm. Here the GFX lags with a pixel pitch of 5.3 µm. The GFX is a compromise between these two cameras in a similar size package. In other words, the GFX has a much better pixel pitch than the low-resolution cameras and a much better dynamic range than the high pixel pitch cameras, without creating a camera and lens package that is much bigger. A very nice compromise.

When you look at the size of the GFX 50R, you can see how it is now much easier to fit into a smaller shoulder back, making it more comfortable to field than the older traditional medium format cameras. The image below shows the more massive GFX 50S in Think Tanks Series 13 bag designed for a standard size DSLR with the mid-range zoom attached plus 2-3 lenses.

Think Tank Signature 13 bag

TGFX 50S Kit with three lenses

GFX 100S

Fuji Guys – FUJIFILM GFX 50R – First Look
Capture One Pro 11.3 for all Fujifilm cameras
Theoria Apophasis review of all GFX lenses
Big Head Taco’s review of GFX System
DPReview: Opinion: Thinking about buying a medium format? Read this first
Ten reasons to switch to Capture One Pro 9, Alexander Svet
Sony A7RIII vs Fujifilm GFX 50s – Image Quality Comparison
D850 vs GRF 50s Image Quality