Fujifilm GFX 100 II preview

Product photos: Richard Butler

The Fujifilm GFX100 II is the company’s latest high resolution medium format camera, that brings the latest AF and video capabilities to a redesigned camera body.

Key specifications

• 102MP BSI CMOS 44x33mm medium format sensor
• AI-derived subject recognition AF system
• In-body image stabilization rated at 8EV
• Continuous shooting at up to 8fps
• Extensive video options including 8K and anamorphic support
• 9.44M dot OLED EVF
• Waveform and Vectorscope display for video
• Direct record to SSD
• Camera to cloud support
• IPTC metadata

The Fujifilm GFX 100 II will be available from September 2023 at a suggested price of $7499.

Alongside the GFX100 II, Fujifilm also announced the GF 55mm F1.7R and two tilt-shift lenses, the GF30mm F5.6R WR T/S and the GF110mm F5.6R WR T/S, significantly expanding the GF series range of capabilities for architectural and product photography.

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Index:

• What is it, what’s new?
• How it compares
• Body and controls
• Video capabilities
• Initial impressions
• Sample gallery
• Specifications
• Fujifilm press release

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What is it, what’s new?

The GFX100 II appears to split the difference between the original GFX 100 and the smaller, less expensive GFX 100S. It has the smaller, single grip body and smaller battery of the latter but the high res removable viewfinder of the former.

In terms of stills photography, Fujifilm says the new camera is enhanced primarily in terms of speed and autofocus capabilities. But in terms of capabilities, there are even greater additions on the video side of the mode switch.

New, faster sensor

The sensor is a faster variant of the one used in the GFX 100 and 100S. Fujifilm says this version of the sensor has greater full well capacity (the amount of charge it can handle before clipping), letting it offer a base ISO of 80 for stills shooting. It also uses revised analog-to-digital circuitry to deliver twice the readout speed. The faster sensor works in tandem with the company’s latest ‘X Processor 5’ chip to deliver a range of features, many of which were first seen on the X-H2 cameras. Offset microlenses improve both image performance at the corners and AF performance when using AF points away from the center.

The new processor helps improve the effectiveness of the stabilization system, using analysis of the live view feed as well as gyro sensor information to interpret camera movement. The GFX 100 II achieving a rating of up to 8EV of correction in standard tests, compared with 5.5EV of correction with the original GFX 100.

The GFX 100 II also gains a new Film Simulation mode: Reala ACE, a recreation of one of Fujifilm’s more lifelike film stocks. It’s similar to Provia but with slightly lower saturation and slightly lower contrast. It’s not as big a difference as the camera’s negative film modes, letting it act as an alternative default shooting mode.

Autofocus

The GFX 100 II essentially gains its AF system from Fujifilm’s recent X-H cameras, adding subject-recognition for improved subect tracking. It can recognize all the subject types that those cameras can:

• Animal
• Bird
• Automobile
• Motocycle & bike
• Airplane
• Train

Like the X-H cameras, human face and eye detection are treated as distinct AF modes that override one another, so you’ll need to customize two buttons if you want to re-engage human face/eye detection, having just used a subject detection mode, and vice versa. Even if you do devote a button to subject detection, there’s no option to hold down the button and spin the dial to cycle between subject types, so you may find it easier to use the Q Menu to engage and select them.

AF Tracking in video.

Unlike the X-H cameras, the GFX 100 II offers these subject recognition modes while shooting video. The camera also gains a general tracking mode in video, for tracking subjects the camera hasn’t been trained to recognize. This is a big step forward and something we hope is extended to the X-H2 models at the very least.

It’s actually in video that we see the biggest changes in the new camera, to the point where there’s so much to say that we’ve split it out as its own section, further down the page.

4-image pixel shift mode

In addition to the 16-image pixel shift mode, that generates 400MP images, the GFX 100 II gains a four-shot mode that just cancels the Bayer filter by capturing Red, Green and Blue information for each pixel position. This mode also boosts the tonal quality by combining four frames.

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How it compares

The only other 100MP cameras on the market are Fujifilm’s previous GFX 100 models and the X2D 100c from Hasselblad. Despite all being based around essentially the same sensor, they’re quite different cameras.

Fujifilm and Hasselblad are destined always to be compared to one another, having introduced 44x33mm medium format systems at around the same time, but they’re based on slightly different approaches. Hasselblad opted for leaf shutters in its lenses: allowing flash sync at any speed and keeping the size of the body down, but with downsides in terms of lens cost and polygonal bokeh in many circumstances. Fujifilm’s cameras are a little larger but the system cost ends up being lower, in part because you’re not having to buy a new shutter mechanism with each lens.

Both companies have made improvements to image stabilization and burst rates with their latest models but Fujifilm has, as we’ll see, really committed to video, whereas Hasselblad has omitted it entirely.

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Body and handling

The GFX 100 II’s body is something of a mid-point between the large double-gripped GFX 100 and the more compact GFX 100S. It features a more squared-off, very modern looking design language: it’s only upon seeing its rounded rectangular buttons that I realised how rare it is to see anything other than circular buttons on a camera.

It’s a solid, fairly heavy camera but with a well-shaped hand grip that I found comfortable to use, on the occasions I was looking to hand-hold the camera with one of its smaller lenses.

As with previous GFX cameras, the GFX 100 II expects you to use a combination of buttons and dials to change exposure settings (there are no dedicated exposure dials at all), but it lets you assign multiple parameters to a single dial, then press in on the dial to cycle between them, so you don’t necessarily need to have a dedicated ISO or Exposure Comp button to change those settings.

On the base of the camera is a series of connectors for adding the optional vertical control grip.

Viewfinder

The removable viewfinder either allows you to make the camera smaller or to add the EVF-TL1 angle adapter to give the viewfinder a range of motion.

The GFX 100 II has the same style removable viewfinder as the original GFX 50S and GFX 100, meaning it can be removed if your shooting doesn’t require it, or can have an articulated mechanism interposed between the body and the viewfinder module if you want to be able to tilt the finder up from the body.

It’s a 9.44M dot panel that provides 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution and delivers excellent detail if you punch in to manual focus (especially useful when working with the tilt/shift lenses launched alongside it). Fujifilm says it’s delivering a 1944-line image feed to the finder. The screen refreshes at 60Hz. If you drop to a smaller view with 0.77x magnification (the same size as the GFX 100S), you can get 120Hz refresh, for shooting fast-moving subjects.

Rear screen

For all the added focus on video, the GFX 100 II retains the two-way tilting rear screen that we’ve grown to really enjoy on its cameras. This will tilt up and down or off to the right for portrait shooting. Unlike side-hinged, fully-articulated screens, this keeps the screen on axis if you’re shooting in the portrait orientation, making it much easier to make sense of camera movements when working that way ’round.

Ports

The GFX 100 II has all the connectors you’d expect of a modern pro camera: full-sized HDMI, Ethernet for tethered working and a USB-C socket over which you can capture stills or video to an external SSD. There’s a 3.5mm mic input on the left-hand flank of the camera and a matching headphone socket on the right corner.

On the front of the body is a flash sync terminal, showing Fujifilm isn’t overlooking the likelihood of this camera being studio based.

Battery

The GFX 100 II uses the same NP-W235 battery as the 100S and the larger X-series models. It’s a 16Wh battery but that’s pretty small for such a large sensor camera with ambitions to venture beyond the studio.

The camera can, as you’d expect, charge the battery or be powered over its USB-C socket, but it’s worth noting that this rules out the option of recording direct to SSD and powering the camera over USB at the same time.

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Video capabilities

A full-sized HDMI port barely hints and what Fujifilm has added to the GFX 100 II’s video capabilities.

The spec that risks getting most attention on the GFX 100 II is its ability to capture 8K video but it’s worth noting that this comes with a significant 1.53x crop, down to a roughly 29 x 16mm region of the sensor. This is larger than Super35 and instead around the size of the RED Helium 8K sensor from a few years ago, but it’s not necessarily the camera’s most capable mode.

GF lens mode	Premista lens mode	35mm lens mode	Anamorphic mode

Delve into the menus and you’ll find DCI or UHD 4K at up to 60p and a range of high-res 5.xK capture options for working with three different types of lenses. The camera lets you select whether you have a native GF lens, one of Fujifilm’s professional Premista zoom lenses or a 35mm (‘full-frame’) lens and uses the largest sensor region it can.

Anamorphic support

In addition to the modes listed above, the GFX 100 II also provides some support for the use of anamorphic lenses. The anamorphic modes essentially duplicate the options available for the 35mm image circle but give you the option of viewing a de-squeezed projection. You can separately choose whether you want this desqueezed preview to apply while you’re shooting, during playback or both.

The squeeze ratios supported by the camera are: 2x, 1.8x, 1.5x, 1.33x and 1.3x.

In addition to the standard modes for 35mm lenses there are a couple of options specific to Anamorphic mode, though. The first is a tall 1.38 crop, recorded at 4.6K resolution that pushes out to the edge of the image circle. The second is taken from the same region of the sensor but with a 2x desqueeze applied in camera, output as an 8K wide 2.76:1 format.

Rolling shutter

We’ve not had a chance to measure every mode of the camera, but the modes we’ve looked into suggest the camera is using a series of readout modes and sub-sampling strategies to generate its many crops and resolution modes. In 14-bit mode, the sensor takes around 164ms to read its full 102 million pixels, so it’s not plausible that it’s using all its pixels to produce most of this footage, even if you assume a drop to 12-bit sampling for video.

The 8K modes are the ones that appear to be sampling every pixel (seemingly from a fractionally less than 8K region, and upscaling) and these have the worst rolling shutter despite using the smallest crops of the sensor. So it’s reasonable to assume the other modes are pixel-binning or line-skipping to some extent.

Lens mode	Resolution/frame rate	Rolling shutter
GF (55mm ∅)	UHD 4K 60, 23.98	15.0ms
	DCI 4K 23.98	14.0ms
	5.8K Cine (2.35:1) 23.98	26.1ms
	UHD 8K 23.98	31.0ms
	DCI 8K 23.98	33.2ms
Premista (46.3mm ∅)	UHD 4K 60, 23.98	13.7ms
	5.4K (1.89:1) 23.98	28.1ms
35mm (43.3mm ∅)	UHD 4K / 4.8K (16:9) 23.98	23.6ms
	4.8K (3:2) 23.98	27.9ms
Anamorphic (43.3mm ∅)	4.6K (1.38:1) 23.98	29.7ms

We’ll have to wait for a production camera to check how the detail capture levels vary across all these modes, but most of the 4K modes have pretty well-controlled rolling shutter (particularly the GF and Premista modes that offer up to 60p capture), but some of the higher resolution modes show the degree of rolling shutter starting to creep up.

Waveforms & vectorscopes

As well as this vast range of video modes, the GFX 100 II also gains waveform and vectorscope displays, to help assess color and exposure in video. These are excellent tools, common in the video industry, to help when setting up a shot.

Waveforms show the brightness distribution in the scene. Unlike a histogram, which just plots how many pixels there are of each value, a waveforms display plots them based on where they are in the image: essentially you get a tiny bar graph for every column of pixels in your image, which makes it each to see what light source or object is causing a region to overexpose, for instance. The GFX 100 II not only offers a based luminance waveform but also an RGB Parade: three mini waveforms that show the brightness distribution for each channel.

The GFX 100 II becomes the first hybrid camera we’ve encountered to offer an RGB Parade display as well as luminance waveforms.

The vectorscope, meanwhile, indicates the hue and intensity of color in the scene, making it easier to match between shots. Both tools can be adjusted to appear in four combinations of size and position around the screen.

Beyond this, the camera has features such as front and rear tally lamps and the ability to use fractional shutter speeds to avoid frequency clashes with flickering screens or light sources within your scene.

The GFX 100 II can also be used with the optional screw-in FAN-001 accessory first introduced alongside the X-H2S. Like previous cameras, you have to pull the rear screen out of the way when the fan unit is attached: something that’s arguably even more awkward with the GFX 100 II’s tilting screen that can’t simply be flipped out to one side.

Adding the fan boosts the 4K/60p recording duration from 151 minutes to unlimited recording, at 25°C, according to Fujifilm’s own testing. 8K capture increases from 107 minutes to 137min.

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Initial impressions

It feels odd to be writing about a GFX camera and be so focused on video. That’s perhaps a little unfair: the faster shooting speed, improved image stabilization and subject recognition AF system all help make the camera significantly more flexible, futher enhancing its in-the-studio-and-beyond utility.

The ergonomics of the camera are excellent and the release of a bright normal prime and a pair of tilt/shift lenses also helps expand the types of photography the GF system can accommodate. Even if you never shoot a single frame of video, the GFX 100 II represents a major step forward for the system.

But it’s the extent of the improvements to the video side of things that we weren’t expecting. It’s essentially three (maybe even four?) different video cameras depending on whether you plan to use GF lenses, full-frame glass, anamorphics or Fujinon Premista optics. The capabilities and performance of the camera shift depending on which of these options you choose.

The addition of a full-sized HDMI port, the ability to capture ProRes 422 footage, the option to output direct to SSD, the inclusion of vectorscope and waveform displays, all point to Fujifilm devoting a lot of time and effort to deliver a camera that video creatives will take to easily. I’m not sure many of us had been expecting a medium format camera with four-channel audio support and a mode for use with anamorphic lenses, but that’s where Fujifilm apparently wants to lead us.

We’ll have to test the footage once we get hold of a production-spec camera but it’s hard not to see the ambition as pretty radical.

We don’t know what (if any) impact this will have on the stills side of things. In principle trying to run the sensor faster could increase read noise, which would slightly dent DR measurements. But we’d recommend witholding judgement until we’ve seen whether there’s a meaningful difference in the camera’s images (rather than any measured numbers) before taking to the photographic barricades.

If the GF system finds a market amongst videographers, that can only help support its future, and lead to an expansion of the system as a whole, benefiting all users. Even if the video capabilities don’t excite you, the arrival of the 55mm F1.7 fast normal and the 30mm and 110mm F5.6 tilt/shifts should bring a wider range of photographers under the GF banner. Vive la révolution!

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Sample gallery

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