Making the plunge into the medium format world

It was just a matter of time. Sensor size does matter for passionate photographers like myself. I used to shoot with full frame but had deliberately avoided medium format. The latter never attracted me – camera size and weight seemed to much too handle. But along came Fuji with the GFX100RF and I couldn’t resist. It is a surprisingly small and compact medium format range finder camera. Small enough to act as an every day companion.

Testing the Fuji GFX100RF

Last night I took the new Fuji GFX100RF out for its first spin. The summer sky was covered in fluffy clouds and it looked like we would have some fantastic light for sunset.

The GFX100RF felt instantly familiar in hand — surprisingly light to carry, intuitive to handle, just as I’ve come to expect from Fuji. All the controls and menus are a carbon copy from their other models.

While moving around to find a decent photo spot, I spent time experimenting with the aspect ratio dial and the built-in crop zoom. Both features are a joy to use — especially the aspect ratio dial, which is a real winner. Super fun and it opens up new creative possibilities. Being able to frame the shot exactly as it will appear later is far more satisfying than guessing and cropping in Lightroom afterwards.

File Handling

The files themselves are full of detail, rich, and extremely flexible. No surprises here – that’s why you go with medium format. Lightroom actually performed really well on my M4 MacBook Air. I didn’t notice any lag or such. The only downside I have notice so far is their handling when it comes to moving them. Transferring RAW files to the Fuji app definitely requires a bit more patience; each compressed RAW is well over 100MB and it takes noticeably longer than the files from the X-T5 or X100VI. Still, that’s the price of this much image data, and I’ll keep testing to see how it fits into my workflow.