[Music] all right so this is the Fujifilm GFX100 RF it is a rangefinder style fixed lens medium format camera and that makes it the only fixed lens medium format digital camera to exist it's 102 megapixels it's using the same sensor as the GFX100 the second and it's honestly not that much bigger than the Fujifilm X1006 that it borrows a lot of the design elements from in a lot of ways it kind of just is a medium format X1006 i mean it's got a fixed lens it's got that combined shutter speed and ISO dial it's got a built-in ND filter i'm pretty sure it's using the exact same leaf shutter mechanism in the lens but this camera is unique in one very special way let me explain okay so when you shoot film there's a few different film formats that you can choose from right there's 35 mm or full-frame there's 120 film which is the most popular style for medium format and then there's the really big stuff like 4x5 and 8x10 sheet film that you shoot on a Vue camera now roll film types like 35 mm and 120 film are standardized in the vertical dimension that means they've got a set height but no particular maximum width that you can expose to right technically as long as you can produce a big enough image circle you can expose on a shorter or longer piece of that film so like for example on a standard 35mm camera like the Nikon FM2 Titanium you're exposing light onto a 36x 24mm piece of film that's about a 3x2 aspect ratio and probably the most common aspect ratio that you're going to find on most cameras you can do other aspect ratios on 35mm like for example the recently released Pentax 17 camera is a half frame camera and that means it uses the 35mm format but only opens the film gate half as wide so you get about a 1.4 to2 aspect ratio with this camera and instead of just getting 36 shots you get 72 alternatively the Fujifilm TX1 also known as the Hassablot Xpan also uses 35mm film but on this camera the film curtain opens twice as wide so you get about a 5.4:2 aspect ratio now on medium format film also called 120 film you've got even more common formats and that's because just like on 35mm film as long as you can project an image circle wide enough with enough intensity you can go pretty much as wide as you want so on just 120 film you've got 645 6x 6 6x7 6x 8 6x9 6x2 6x7 and yes even 6x 24 we love it and back in the day Fujifilm and all these other brands made basically whatever format camera you'd want right just Fujifilm alone made the G645 they made the Fujika 6 the GF670 the GX 680 and the G67 which all used 120 film but just shot wider and wider depending on your taste and having all these different aspect ratios available is one of the things that makes film photography so fun like different scenarios call for different aspect ratios right like a landscape calls for 6x7 and a portrait might call for 645 the bigger the piece of film you project onto the more effective resolution you can get out of that film because while you're technically getting the same field of view you've got more physical information between tones and the same is true on a bigger higher resolution digital sensor but when cameras made the jump to digital they generally restricted what kind of aspect ratios you could shoot in to just a few different ones and that's because when you're cropping to a specific aspect ratio you're sacrificing a lot of resolution like for example when Fujifilm announced the XPro 3 I begged them to add a 65x 24x1 crop to that camera but they didn't want to do it because that camera is 27 megapixels on an APS-C sensor and if you crop half of the vertical resolution of that camera you're left with about 13 megapixels which they just didn't want to do but when you make a sensor bigger there's a couple of decisions you can make you can either maintain the resolution but get more light per pixel also called pixel pitch or you can scale up the resolution but get about the same pixel pitch getting more light in each pixel is important because it gives you a better signal to noise ratio that's basically the raw information that the sensor is getting versus the noise that the sensor is also naturally getting it just basically gives you a cleaner image fuji's first medium format sensor was 50 megapixels which gave it a pixel pitch of 5.33 microme the XPro 3 had a pixel pitch of 3.76 microme so on Fujifilm's most recent medium format sensor they scaled up the resolution to 102 megapixels but maintains that same 3.76 micrometer pixel pitch and I think having a bigger sensor with a higher resolution while maintaining that pixel size is what made Fujifilm finally comfortable making this the GFX100 RF a fixed lens medium format digital camera with nine different film based aspect ratios and four different virtual focal lengths on the 100 RF you can do 3x2 645 6x6 6x7 6x8 6x9 65x 24 6x7 and 4x5 now Fuji uses more modern labels for these but that's what it's called on the film cameras that this camera is emulating so what I'm going to do now is test the heck out of this aspect ratio dial i'm going to take this camera and a couple of film cameras that shoot weird wonky aspect ratios with me all the way to Utah shoot both of them walk around with them for a few days and see how they work out so let's check it out [Music] hey I'm back and after using this camera for a few weeks I've got a lot of thoughts okay so first things first the aspect ratio dial on this camera is freaking awesome part of the reason people like Fujifilm cameras already is because they can dial in the color they want before they take the shot and I would argue that dialing in your aspect ratio as you're composing your shot is even more valuable also this isn't just on the JPEGs you can bring the RAWs into Lightroom and they'll actually be pre-cropped but then you can zoom back out if you want the full image now obviously these are also things you can do in post right you can change your color in post you can change your aspect ratio in post this camera is not going to magically give you a bunch of new capabilities that you can't do in your editing program but I would argue that being able to compose the photo pretty much exactly how you want in camera is a really nice capability and I just really like dials but having all that resolution is actually useful for another reason because this sensor is 102 megapixels you can just crop into the center of the sensor and basically emulate different focal lengths fuji gives you 35mm 45mm 63mm and 80 millimeter which in full-frame terms is like a 28 mm a 35mm a 50 mm and a 63 mm a lot of the times I'd see a scene where I knew there was something there but I didn't love how it looked straight out of camera so I'd try a few different aspect ratios a few different virtual focal lengths and eventually I'd find something that I really liked this feels really counterintuitive for a fixed lens camera where you're used to just having one option but it was really nice now that said 63 mm is not the longest focal length and even the Leica Q3 has a 90 mm option so I really wish Fuji would make like a telephoto lens adapter or something for this camera now there's two main negatives that I've got to talk about with this camera it has a minimum aperture of f4 and there's no optical image stabilization and I think these two things in combination was a pretty big miss most of the medium format look that a lot of people will talk about with these cameras actually comes from a faster lens on a bigger sensor not just the sensor size itself so even though this camera is really versatile in a lot of ways it's not that great for like everyday portraits for example it just doesn't have that much bokeh and when you combine those two things you're definitely going to have to bring a tripod if you plan on shooting in pretty low light conditions or if you want to shoot at relatively low shutter speeds now if you're shooting in low light you could just jack up the ISO by a ton and honestly the images still look pretty good when you do that i would just prefer not to have to do that you know now as someone who shoots mostly landscapes and mostly on film I'm already pretty used to these limitations but for a camera that's otherwise so versatile it just kind of seems like a miss what's kind of wild to me is how small the actual lens on this camera is i mean if you compare it to the Leica Q3 a full-frame camera it's like a third of that size but if you want to use the lens hood you got to attach the filter ring adapter and that pretty much triples the size of the lens and if you're going to do that why not just make a faster lens okay so just to give you a sense of what this thing can do I'm going to show you a bunch of photos taken on the GFX100 RF next to the film cameras that they were actually emulating so you can just get a sense of what photos kind of look like with this thing [Music] overall this camera is really fun the aspect ratio dial is one of the best additions to cameras that I've seen in a really long time and I really hope they bring it to other GFX cameras in the future but I also think that the lack of stabilization and a relatively slow lens is going to get this thing compared to the Leica Q3 a lot especially because that camera has an F1.7 lens and it has stabilization albeit for you know like $1,400 more anyways hope that was helpful thanks for watching catch you guys next time I've got something to say see you