
Fujifilm’s GFX 100 – A medium format mirrorless camera - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18636034/fujifilm-gfx100-medium-format-digital-camera-announcement-price-specs-features-hands-on
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NikolaNovak
I understand that's the actual, original title, but it is so semantically
meaningless. GFX _is_ a "Mirrorless Camera" (with a large sensor). So of
course it "performs like a mirrorless".

I get what they're trying to say ("This is not your daddy's medium-frame"),
but the notion that these are somehow qualities intrinsic in a "Mirrorless"
designation irks me. (Certain) DLSRs were fast, small, portable, effective and
efficient long before mirrorless.

As well, the notion that GFX isn't a "Mirrorless", or that "Mirrorless"
implies a particular sensor size (such as m4/3rds or similar) is again
erronenous.

Medium format was expensive, unwieldy and slow due to artificial market
segmentation, limited competition, and essentially being at the far *-phile
end of the price/feature curve.

Fuji is a new entry and an underdog competitor, which is what drives most of
the attractive features, not just the mirrorless part.

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la_barba
All they mean is that medium format cameras are perceived to be slow, while
'mirrorless' cameras are not. Its no different than people thinking "AMD chips
run hot" when that hasn't been true for years.

There is a lot of misinformation, incorrect assumptions, and sacred cows in
the world. If every article was written to correct those assumptions, then (1)
it could consume the entire article (2) nobody would actually even read them
(3) no ad-revenue would mean such publications would eventually die out.

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jdsully
Which AMD chips ran hot? For me nothing will ever compare to the P4 for
thermals (even though modern chips have higher power consumption).

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jdietrich
The 15h (Bulldozer to Excavator) series had pretty lousy efficiency, with most
desktop parts having a TDP of 95W or 125W. The FX-9590 achieved some level of
notoriety for having a 220W TDP despite only having four real cores.

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jdsully
The real problem with bulldozer was by that point they were so far behind
nobody in my circle bothered mentioning them at all.

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NikolaNovak
I would agree in principle; in practice, my main desktop is still FX-8350. I
keep looking for excuse to replace it... and not finding one :-/

Still available as new in mainstream shops [1], and at recent times strangely
peaked specific price/performance chart. It boggles my mind to be honest :P

1:
[https://www.newegg.ca/p/pl?d=fx-8350&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Submit=...](https://www.newegg.ca/p/pl?d=fx-8350&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH)

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ekianjo
Here's a sample picture at full resolution (100M pixels):

[https://1.img-
dpreview.com/files/p/sample_galleries/60445538...](https://1.img-
dpreview.com/files/p/sample_galleries/6044553814/1399808671.jpg)

The amount of details is impressive.

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pdpi
If you look at the fine details, everything is soft. Not one single line in
the whole photo looks crisp and sharp.

This is not an issue with the camera, mind you — just a fact of life when
taking photos at this sort of range — but it does highlight why you don't get
nearly as much of a benefit from that 100MP sensor versus their 50MP medium
format cameras as you'd think you do.

This is undoubtedly a brilliant studio camera for applications like fashion or
product photography, but completely and utterly pointless as a landscape
camera, where physics severely limits the benefits you're getting for the
extra price.

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klodolph
> If you look at the fine details, everything is soft. Not one single line in
> the whole photo looks crisp and sharp.

This is generally true with color digital cameras that use color filter
arrays, which is most digital cameras. I have yet to see a camera with a color
filter array which looks "sharp" at 1:1 pixels.

To me the detail looks quite acceptable, but I'm not directly comparing it
against other photos so I might be wrong.

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Xcelerate
> I have yet to see a camera with a color filter array which looks "sharp" at
> 1:1 pixels.

Check out Foveon sensors in Sigma cameras. They are really impressive.

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Palomides
agreed, every pixel from the 3-layer foveon images is great, they have a very
unique look

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falcrist
That's a bit of an odd title. This _is_ a mirrorless camera.

I always found it interesting that medium format cameras generally don't have
the fastest lenses. The fastest autofocus primes I see are f/2.8 and f/4,
which are roughly equivalent in speed to an f/1.6 or f/2.3 respectively. I'm
sure the quality is better, but I'd love to know why manufacturers don't seem
to be pushing the aperture as hard with medium format as they do with full
frame.

Of course, I'd love to play around with one of these... Even if it would be
massive overkill for anything I'm doing.

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coldtea
> _but I 'd love to know why manufacturers don't seem to be pushing the
> aperture as hard with medium format as they do with full frame._

For one because the DoF would be so small as to make focusing almost
impossible wide open...

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lb1lf
That, and the sheer amount of glass you'd need would make for an excellent
workout session every time you went shooting.

Say, a 250mm f/1.4 with an image circle large enough to be useful on 6x9 would
be quite the beast (and impossible to focus on my Texas Leica.)

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lrem
You've got computers to focus for you, for the reasonable price of adding a
motor strong enough to move all that glass ;)

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CydeWeys
This sensor has a 55 mm diagonal vs the 43 mm diagonal you see on a full-frame
sensor. That's 1.7X the total sensor surface area.

I guess there's some people who will "need" this, but the vast majority of
photographers (even professionals) can make do with smaller and cheaper
cameras/lenses. I have an M4/3 camera on the other end of the scale that fits
in my jacket pocket when I put a pancake lens on it.

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durandal1
Note that while this indeed qualifies as medium format, it's pretty far from
the classic 6x7 film format. As a fan of medium format (something about the
compression and distorsion of a portrait lens, but with the viewport taking in
more environment), I really hope we're going to see a more "true" medium
format in the future.

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la_barba
Assuming equal resolution (i.e. not equal pixel size), the nice thing about
moving to medium format sensors from full frame is that it relaxes the
tolerances required to create high quality lenses as far as optical quality is
concerned. But OTOH, you have to deal with a larger mass of glass. On the
sensor side, the yield on the wafer is probably going to be very low when you
have to create such large sensors without a single hot pixel. Then there's the
total light gathered, which is always going to favour larger sensors, as long
as you can get your exit pupil to be large enough. Its going to be interesting
to see how this plays out over the next decade.

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jws
What test would you run to see if your camera's sensor had a hot pixel which
was replaced in processing by neighboring pixels?

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la_barba
Well, for one, neighboring pixels are already being used during demosaicing.

But I understand your question. For an end-user to detect such overt
manipulation, you'd probably need to take successive frames with the lens cap
on, and observe how the RAW sensor values change over time and find patterns
in the noise levels. A pixel thats duplicated will stand out. That's all I
have :^) I'll have to think a bunch to understand it at a deeper level...

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jdfellow
Fuji was a major player in the rangefinder (mirrorless) medium format film
cameras market (G645, G690W, etc), so this is a good return to form for them!

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jonknee
Well they also have lots of other mirrorless digital cameras, the newsworthy
part here is that this one is a medium format camera (of which there aren't
too many with or without mirrors, it's a very niche segment).

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antihero
I always found it hard getting lenses for my XT-10, but maybe I am just bad at
looking. The kit lens it comes with is not great, and it seems the only other
options are £300 prime lenses.

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aaronbrethorst
A high quality £300 prime lens is not a bad price. The 35mm f/2 essentially
lives on my XT-2. For its size, weight, and price, it’s a terrific lens.

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fumar
I agree and use the 23mm f/2 more than my other primes. It is small and keeps
the weight distributed nicely on the body. Although the 56 mm f/1.2 is a king
for depth of field and bokeh. I sold my 16 mm and kept the 23mm so wider
shots.

