FujiFilm GFX100S - All Of The Megapixels - Review

[Music] what's up friends i got a brand new video for you today and today we're gonna take a look at the new fuji gfx100s and this camera was released back in january of 2021 and fuji didn't have enough review units so i didn't get one so instead of having a couple days to shoot with it i got quite a long time to shoot with it so this review is coming from a place of time and experience with this camera and i did get to use it on multiple shoots as well as client jobs and i gotta say i really love this camera the more and more i use it right off the bat i will say this is a very very niche camera it's not your typical camera that you can just do anything with um even though it's very versatile it is a versatile camera can do a lot it's not the camera you're gonna buy to go out and shoot your kid's birthday party with and i assume that the majority of the people that are gonna be watching this video will probably never ever buy this camera but you might be curious about it because it is a special camera it's designed for like the highest level quality detail you can get in a camera so it's going to be used for different things like high-end fashion portrait photography product photography and the truth is most of us will never need 100 megapixels but if you get the chance to experience the crazy dynamic range the insane detail you know phase detect autofocus ibis that's in a medium format camera then it's going to be kind of tough to go back to anything less i want to take a quick second to talk about the feel of this camera because i don't get too much into ergonomics typically i should just say oh yeah it feels good in the hand or you know it doesn't feel that good in the hand but this camera seriously feels amazing you just feel the quality right as soon as you pick it up and hold it it's got a solid build it feels like a tank without being like too heavy because it is a it is a relatively big camera but i do find that it also balances really nice with the fuji gf lenses the bigger gf lenses for this map all the buttons feel great they have a nice tactile feel to them we've got the locking dial on top here i love the button layout it's simplistic it's very similar to the gfx 100 layout and i got to warn you right now i'm probably going to compare this a lot to the gfx 100 because it's basically the exact same camera with the grip sawed off and also the price it's four thousand dollars cheaper so they updated the size of the joystick the joystick's a lot bigger now compared to the traditional one that fuji's been using for a while now typically it's like a small little bump and this is way bigger with a nice grip on it and speaking of grip it has a really nice grip it wraps nice they've got a nice thumb protruding area on the back so it fits your hand really nice it is pretty thick if you have bigger hands you'll be fine but if you have smaller hands it might be an issue so i'm assuming that some of you have probably already watched reviews on this camera since it's been out for a bit now and most of you probably know the specs of this camera but i'm going to run through some as a refresher this is a medium format bsi 102 megapixel sensor 5-axis in-body stabilization with a way smaller mech in it compared to the gfx 100 and it's also way more improved as well and i'll get to that later it has an iso range of 100 to 12800 425 phase detect autofocus points five frames per second continuous shooting which doesn't sound like a lot but you gotta remember the sensor is huge and that's 102 megapixels every frame it has a 3.69 million dot oled evf which is really nice it looks great but that's also where the camera cuts corners compared to the gfx 100 because it actually has almost double the resolution it has the same top sub lcd to see all your settings and the cool thing is this camera actually has six programmable custom settings which you can use for both video or photo and it's really nice to have that option it has a 3.2 inch touchscreen it's 2.36 million dots and it's a three-way tilting screen so you can tilt it out as well as off to the side which is the same as a gfx and other cameras like the fuji xt3 and when it comes to the i o on this camera it has dual uh s2 card slots 3.5 millimeter mic and headphone jack micro hdmi usb c 3.2 gen 1. it's obviously a magnesium alloy weather sealed camera body and it has 19 film simulations which includes one brand new one called nostalgic negative i'll have some images of that film simulation throughout this video so you guys can see what that looks like so i want to talk about the autofocus because this has always been a polarizing topic for me with fuji cameras and i always feel like the processing and algorithms and fuji cameras are pretty good but that the lenses can't really keep up with that and i found this is kind of the same issue with the gfx100s it feels really slow it has a tendency to hunt all over the place uh even in photo and video but it majorly just depends on the lens some are faster than others which you know it's kind of the same as the fuji x system so most of the portrait shoots i tried to capture the screen to show iaf and you guys can kind of see what i'm talking about it pulses and has a hard time locking onto the eye and i know that i'm spoiled by sony's insane accurate autofocus system that i use typically if i went back to using the single point autofocus using the joystick i found it to be way more reliable and that's totally okay because the autofocus and af s which is just single point is actually really good but as i said when it comes to afc the continuous autofocus that's where i had a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of issues no matter what autofocus custom settings i tried autofocus and video has the same inconsistencies as well there's lots of times where it made no effort to focus at all like i take the camera and move from one object to the next and nothing would happen and i'd turn up the sensitivity the tracking sensitivity and it didn't seem to make any changes at all which is kind of odd and i don't know if there's going to be some firmware updates to fix that i also don't know how many people are actually buying this camera for video anyway but it's something i obviously have to cover if i'm reviewing this camera of course it has all the amazing film simulations i mentioned before that you can also use in video it can do 10 bit 422 out of the hdmi and atomos actually just added firmware update to the ninja that allows it to also do 12-bit raw out of the hdmi so that's prores raw now i briefly touched on the in-body stabilization of this camera and it's it's really good this is a fully new redesigned smaller mech that is found in the gfx 100 and this is actually rated for six stops and it also works with lenses with ois and i don't think that the gfx100 had that option so it's it's pretty good it's pretty smooth i found it to have less jarring and jumpiness than i'm used to from fuji's ibis and you have a couple of different options as well so you can shoot with the standard ibis which is what most people will leave it in all the time because it looks pretty natural but there's also the option to use ibis plus digital stabe which will crop in a bit but it adds a bit of extra digital stabilization on top of it i personally didn't notice a major difference between the stabilization settings and then there's ibis boost which is a stronger level of ibis this is more if you want to do some like static shots something similar to a tripod and you're just holding it handheld it's a really strong level of stabilization but i wouldn't use it for anything like pans or moving around because it's going to look really robotic either way it's great to see this technology being added to medium format cameras especially one this small so you have a few options of raw recording in this camera you can do lossless 16-bit or 14-bit raw you can do uncompressed 16-bit or 14-bit raw you can also do compressed 16-bit or 14-bit raw now if you're concerned about file size between shooting uncompressed and lossless i didn't notice any difference between the lossless and uncompressed but i still shot uncompressed raw 16-bit and if you want to see the file size we can look at that in the file size for uncompressed raw 16-bit is around 208 megabytes so obviously i've shown some amazing images throughout this review and the level of detail and image quality from this camera is insane but to really experience it i'm going to zoom in here on the eye and just show you how much detail you can actually see so i'm punched in here and you can see pigment of the eye eyelashes like eyebrows and like all the skin texture and i've already retouched this image and i'm seeing spots that i could actually fix up but yeah it's it's crazy so it's a blessing and a curse to have 100 megapixels because yes you have tons of detail but on the other hand it's a lot more work when you have to do retouching so this camera has insane dynamic range it actually has enormous dynamic range and i want to show you a couple shots here the first one is just a test shot where the flash didn't fire so there's basically nothing exposed and if we go the exposure here and bump it up like five stops it pretty much recovers the entire image we can play with our highlights and stuff still as well as pull more shadows so you can pull more shadows which i don't really want to do i probably won't use this image for anything but just to say that you could recover it you can we could cool it down just a little bit and we could actually add a film simulation on top of this if we wanted to something like classic chrome and go back and maybe a little bit more contrast and there really isn't even that much noise on this image if we zoom in really close here you can see there's still tons of detail and not that much noise considering that we came from an image that looked like this so i want to take a quick second and talk about the nostalgic negative film simulation i feel that it looks the best on street photography i tried it on some portraits and didn't really like the look of it i have a portrait here this is just raw straight out of the camera go up here to camera matching and you can see all our film simulations are in here we now have nostalgic negative and i feel like it has a very rusty look to it like there's a lot of orange and reds in the shadows and it does have a lot of vibrance but for some reason i think it looks amazing when you actually crank the vibrance if we crank the vibrance up here it gives it more of that vintage 70s look and i actually think that looks kind of cool i wouldn't personally use this on a portrait but when you boost the vibrance up it kind of has a nice look to it and i'd pull back the temperature a little bit so it's not quite as orange but i think it looks the best on street photography so something like this nostalgic negative and i like how that looks on this shot will brighten it up a bit but as i mentioned it looks better when you actually boost the vibrance so i feel like when you boost the vibrance you're getting closer to that kind of vintage over saturated vibrant look that they're trying to go for and yeah that's what nostalgic negative looks like so final thoughts on the gfx100s i found the battery life to be pretty decent actually instead of using the large 100 batteries it actually uses the smaller battery that's found in the xt4 i was able to get around three hours on a shoot with one battery without ever shutting the camera off and so in the real world you could probably get around 500 to 600 raw shots per battery and as i mentioned when it comes to the autofocus i found there to be a lot of inconsistencies it's kind of slightly annoying especially when you're shooting afc and you're trying to use iaf but for the most part single point autofocus was accurate didn't have many missed shots in that mode and you know fuji fuji's good with improving things over time with firmware updates so who knows in a year it could be amazing i think if you're working with high-end clients or agency jobs that require like the highest level of detail then this camera is definitely for you the price is relatively cheap when you compare it to other cameras like the other competition in medium format cameras most of them are like four times the price of this and it's actually almost half the price of the gfx 100 so this camera is six thousand dollars u.s and the gfx 100 is 10 000 u.s so there's a big difference there especially when using the exact same sensor that said you can also get close to this level of detail from the sony a7r iv it's smaller it's lighter it has smaller lenses and it has better autofocus so that's just something to keep in mind at the end of the day you know what camera you need for the type of work you're doing and if medium format is the way you want to go then this is probably one of the best options right now especially for the price you're not going to get much better than this for this type of price but yeah thanks for watching this video thanks to fujifilm for sending this out to me to check out if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you just like this video give a thumbs down twice don't forget to hit that notification bell and i'll see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Lee Zavitz

Views: 37,222

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Id: l9V7QsSJKgo

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021