GFX100RF for Fine Art, tripod work - first look

[vieri]

Hello everyone,

I recently and very unexpectedly received a GFX100RF from FujiFilm Italy as a long term loan, which I plan on using side-by-side my 4x5" Arca-Swiss camera, which is my main camera, over our next traveling season. I intend to use the GFX100RF on a tripod, with filters, doing the kind of work I do - something more structured in approach than what the camera is more obviously designed for.

I put together a "first look" article about it, which you can find on my blog, here:

https://www.vieribottazzini.com/2025/09/fine-art-landscape-gfx100rf-a-first-look.html

I am looking forward to working with this little camera in the field, and report back when I am home next spring.

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[anyone]

Enjoy! I bet it will be a fun camera to try out.

 

[vieri]

Enjoy! I bet it will be a fun camera to try out.

Thank you! I wasn't really expecting this, but I am quite intrigued and looking forward to the experience. Best regards,

Vieri

 

[PeterA]

Enjoy using the camera Vieri I will be interested in your views - a very tempting camera - despite its no IBIS - the 1/4000th leaf shutter and long focal length iin XPan modes is the closest true approximate to the XPAN +45mm combo I so much enjoyed back in my film days.
atb
Pete

 

[vieri]

Enjoy using the camera Vieri I will be interested in your views - a very tempting camera - despite its no IBIS - the 1/4000th leaf shutter and long focal length iin XPan modes is the closest true approximate to the XPAN +45mm combo I so much enjoyed back in my film days.
atb
Pete

Hey Pete,

thank you very much, I am very much looking forward to using it. Surprisingly, against my expectations I found the crop modes fun to use - and as an old X-Pan guy I wish the lens were 30mm and the crop mode 45mm, but as you said it's the closest digital approximation, in terms of workflow, and it's already nice to have it (of course, in terms of result cropping any digital image would do, but the experience when shooting would be completely different).

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[anyone]

Hi Vieri,
how are your experiences with the 100RF? Do you like it?

Is there anybody else using this camera? Haven’t seen any pictures in the fun with mf images thread.

 

[vieri]

Hi! I am about halfway through the time Fujifilm graciously allowed me to keep the camera, and so far I loved it - using it in the field for landscape work on a tripod has been super easy, carrying it didn't add much bulk and weight to my already heavy 4x5" kit, the files are beautiful and I have been quite pleased about the whole experience so far. I used round magnetic filters with it, and I never had any problem with those either. I thought the image ratio would be gimmicky but I ended up using it quite a bit, to preview in camera possible crops, and I enjoyed setting the camera to monochrome to preview possible final results. On the other hand, I never used the digital zoom; I decided to just try and use it as a 28mm FOV equivalent machine, to make the most out of the resolution and image quality.

In short, if you are OK with the fixed focal length limitation, I think it's a perfect landscape camera even for deliberate, tripod work.

I am going to hit the road again in under two weeks for our spring Workshop season, but I will write more in detail on my blog when I am back home around Easter.

Hope this helps! Best regards,

Vieri

 

[lookbook]

Hi Vieri,
how are your experiences with the 100RF? Do you like it?

Is there anybody else using this camera? Haven’t seen any pictures in the fun with mf images thread.

https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=GFX100RF&view_all=1

https://www.flickr.com/groups/gfx100rf-gallery/pool/

 

[wattsy]

I must admit this camera still tempts me for landscape work. If Hasselblad sold a small 35mm/F4 in XCD mount I'd stick with my 50MP 907x because I'm happy with the camera but I find the 45P often a little long and the 28P too wide. I like the Hasselblad interface and the colour system but a fixed lens "28mm" with manual control dials is an attractive proposition. I see a lot of GFX100RF bodies for sale on MPB so wonder if there is an obvious cause of regret with this camera? Personally, I usually live in single focal length worlds for certain types of photography so the limitation of the 35mm/F4 isn't a deal-breaker for me.

 

[vieri]

Hey Ian,

the camera is absolutely an interesting proposition if one likes the focal length (as I do); being it a quite particular tool, one must have a good photographic reason to get with it, in my view - what I mean is, it is not a universal camera by any means. Perhaps, and I am wildly speculating here, the reason for all the cameras for sale that you encountered might be that many bought it as "the last new thing", and then sold it when they realised that it wasn't the right tool for them, rather than a particular shortcoming of the camera itself - which, in my view, works fantastically well within its brief.

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[Steve Hendrix]

I must admit this camera still tempts me for landscape work. If Hasselblad sold a small 35mm/F4 in XCD mount I'd stick with my 50MP 907x because I'm happy with the camera but I find the 45P often a little long and the 28P too wide. I like the Hasselblad interface and the colour system but a fixed lens "28mm" with manual control dials is an attractive proposition. I see a lot of GFX100RF bodies for sale on MPB so wonder if there is an obvious cause of regret with this camera? Personally, I usually live in single focal length worlds for certain types of photography so the limitation of the 35mm/F4 isn't a deal-breaker for me.

As a potentially non-universal camera (the way Vieri put it), I could see some buying the GFX 100RF and then realizing they weren't using it as much as they thought. But for perspective, there are ten 100RF bodies on MPB, sixty nine Hasselblad X2D bodies (aided to some degree, no doubt from X2D II upgraders), and twenty three Leica Q3 bodies (nowhere to upgrade to unless they wanted a different lens with the Q3 43).

Photographers can be a fickle bunch. And sometimes impulses happen.


Steve Hendrix
[email protected]

 

[tcdeveau]

As a potentially non-universal camera (the way Vieri put it), I could see some buying the GFX 100RF and then realizing they weren't using it as much as they thought. But for perspective, there are ten 100RF bodies on MPB, sixty nine Hasselblad X2D bodies (aided to some degree, no doubt from X2D II upgraders), and twenty three Leica Q3 bodies (nowhere to upgrade to unless they wanted a different lens with the Q3 43).

Photographers can be a fickle bunch. And sometimes impulses happen.


Steve Hendrix
[email protected]

Fickle and impulsive? Photographers? No never

 

[Steve Hendrix]

Fickle and impulsive? Photographers? No never

I should have prefaced that with "some". But irregardless, no judgement! In fact, we love fickle and impulsive photographers!


Steve Hendrix
[email protected]

 

[vonalpen]

The Fuji GFX100RF is a great little camera that delivers fantastic image quality.
I've been using it for landscape and travel photography since September 2025 and have never regretted buying it.
Every camera with a fixed lens has its limitations.
But the GFX100RF's 35mm lens is perfectly matched to the sensor and delivers amazing sharpness even at f4, right up to the edges.
The electronics (autofocus and exposure metering) have already proven themselves in the other current cameras in the Fuji GFX series.
The sensor is well known, has a wide dynamic range, and good resolution reserves for cropping.
Thanks to the AI noise reduction tools available, the lack of IBIS is not a big problem. When I work freehand, I always set ISO to Auto to achieve sufficiently fast shutter speeds.
Some of the controls are a bit small or prone to misoperation, such as the main switch and the lever for digital magnification.
The menu navigation takes some getting used to for newcomers, but that's probably the case with any new system.
In backlit images, sun stars are not very clearly defined, even stopped down, see example (shot at f11).
But I can live with all the shortcomings mentioned.
In my opinion, the camera has no hidden flaws.
For me the advantages of this combination of a camera with a fixed lens far outweigh the disadvantages.

Best regards

Jost

 

[wattsy]

In backlit images, sun stars are not very clearly defined, even stopped down, see example (shot at f11).
But I can live with all the shortcomings mentioned.

Jost, in your very nice photograph above, the sun rays have a slightly distracting red and green pattern. Is this something you find very often with this lens/sensor combination when shooting at the sun? I'm almost sold on getting the GFX100RF but I often photograph towards the light (not always with the sun in the frame) and this red/green thing would certainly bother me if it happens a lot.

 

[Paul Spinnler]

The PDAF aberrations are sort of a deal breaker IMHO.

I haven't had a Fuji myself yet, but I often hear people dislike the colors. What's up with that? On top of the menus, haptics.

The Hassy files look great, as do the Leica files, but Fuji seems to be its own blend and it seems a bit that people are divided over it and also have difficulty "massaging" the right colors out of the files in post to the point where it is a deal breaker.

Maybe it is just my perception, but I feel there's a certain muddiness in Fuji files, but maybe this is just a perception and one can coax them in post to look more naturally pleasing.

Its also maybe a Japanese color perception thing, Fuji clearly had its own slightly differently tinted skintones and especially different greens during the film days, ie a different aesthetic also related to the differences in Caucasian and Asian skintones, while Kodak lineage or more "Western" look maybe more familiar.

Given color is crucial, more so than resolution these days, I feel this maybe a part of the reason people over time hand back their Fuji cams, especially now that Hassy is in the game at a not too far price point above it, fantastic industrial design and colours.

Still waiting for the 35-100 to be available locally, but I think the fact that you open Hassy files and they look naturally good while you always may feel the need to "color correct" Fuji stuff, may explain why people sell RFs.

Leica also figured it out nicely, both the S3 and M11 have fantastic colors, in their own way though.

 

[wattsy]

The Fuji colours are fine – Provia and Velvia were industry standards for years and, if you don't like them, it is not hard to use a different profile. I was simply asking about the red and green banding in the sun rays in Jost's photograph. If that is PDAF induced, presumably this is more commonplace and will be a 'feature' of X2D photographs too?

 

[Paul Spinnler]

The Fuji colours are fine – Provia and Velvia were industry standards for years and, if you don't like them, it is not hard to use a different profile. I was simply asking about the red and green banding in the sun rays in Jost's photograph. If that is PDAF induced, presumably this is more commonplace and will be a 'feature' of X2D photographs too?

Its not about profiles just. The imaging pipeline consists also of manufacturer specific tweaks spanning the concrete sensor stack implementation to the firmware. I found the Fuji colors in online raw samples to be subjectively inferior to Leica, Hasselblad on an out of the box basis, but this is of course subjective - but something one cannot easily change via presets. The source camera for colors matters. The X2D files look pleasing out of the box, courtesy of HNCS via Phocus.

I think this optical phenomenon also exists on the Hassy digital back, at least I remember some pictures showing it.

 

[rdeloe]

Its not about profiles just. The imaging pipeline consists also of manufacturer specific tweaks spanning the concrete sensor stack implementation to the firmware. I found the Fuji colors in online raw samples to be subjectively inferior to Leica, Hasselblad on an out of the box basis, but this is of course subjective - but something one cannot easily change via presets. The source camera for colors matters. The X2D files look pleasing out of the box, courtesy of HNCS via Phocus.

I think this optical phenomenon also exists on the Hassy digital back, at least I remember some pictures showing it.

That's a bit like saying you don't like the chakra of Fuji colours.

Seriously though, Hasselblad have done a great job of making it easier for people to get the "Hasselblad" colours, but only if they stay inside the walled garden at least until raw development happens. If you don't use Phocus, it's just another RAW file. I don't use Hasselblad, but I like the colours that you get when you stay inside the walled garden.

In my considerable experience with Fuji, how the results from Fuji RAW files look depends on the camera profile used and the skill and taste of the person doing the development. We can replace the word "Fuji" in this sentence with "Hasselblad", "Leica", "Phase One", "Sony", "Canon", etc. The camera profile used with Fuji files makes an enormous difference. Anyone who isn't happy with the profiles provided by their RAW developer (e.g., Adobe Color) or the corresponding camera matching profiles (e.g., Provia as interpreted by Adobe) can find happiness with other profiles. It took me a while to find the one I prefer.

I'm open to someone proving to me that the camera itself has an impact that is not completely overwhelmed by the RAW developer used, the camera profile used, and the skill/taste of the person doing the RAW processing. However, proving this in an objective, replicable way would require a proper double-blind, apples-to-apples comparison. Otherwise it's just subjective preference. And I don't mean to imply subjective preference is bad; it's arguably the most important consideration. It's just that if we want to get past subjective preference, we need double-blind trials.

As much as I'd have fun being part of such a trial, I think ultimately it's a waste of time because subjective preferences (let alone objective considerations like the device we're using to view the comparison file) would muddy the water hopelessly.

 

[rdeloe]

Jost, in your very nice photograph above, the sun rays have a slightly distracting red and green pattern. Is this something you find very often with this lens/sensor combination when shooting at the sun? I'm almost sold on getting the GFX100RF but I often photograph towards the light (not always with the sun in the frame) and this red/green thing would certainly bother me if it happens a lot.

I don't like sun stars and flare so I never see this. That doesn't answer your question... but I did want to mention that I'm not plagued by artifacts like this in my use of the 100 MP Fuji sensor.