I’ve been reading the early reviews on the revolutionary Fujifilm GFX 100 camera body, one of the most spectacularly capable and forward-looking products ever released since the dawn of digital photography roughly 20 years ago.  It has caused me to reflect back on my journey as a longtime Fujifilm shooter.

I remember the beginnings, which were oh, so different.

As I have noted before, on this site, I have a strange penchant for underdogs.  I must unconsciously seek out quirky and unconventional products, that are outside the mainstream.  In the 1990s, when everybody else was buying BMWs, I bought a Subaru SVX, a strange looking but lovely four-wheel-drive coupe.  My newest barbecue pit, a Hasty Bake, a charcoal cooker that is been made in roughly the same form since 1947.  I persist in using my Gravely G Series garden tractor, a stout design from the 1960s, rather than a more modern design from John Deere, or Kubota. 

And I’m a Fujifilm shooter.

I first became interested in the brand round about 2002.  At that point as a former film shooter I had been dabbling with a variety of point and shoot digital cameras, finally graduating to the Olympus E10/20 series. These sort of looked like digital SLRs, but had a fixed lens and a smaller sensor.  As I had some Nikon lenses, I was looking for a body with the Nikon F mount.  In my price range, that meant either a Nikon D100 or this weird camera from Fujifilm, called the S2 pro. 

The Nikon and the Fujifilm were based on a Nikon film body, the N 80 prosumer SLR. The D 100 was a fairly well-integrated product much like modern designs with good performance for the times. The Fujifilm, however, was a weird sort of hybrid, which many reviewers referred to as a “frankencamera” as the digital side of the camera, was obviously grafted to the mechanical parts in a much cruder way.

This manifested for instance, in the need for two types of batteries, a CR 44 to power the body functions, and two AA batteries, for the digital side.  The camera was slower and did not focus as well as its Nikon competition.  And it used weird memory cards.  But much like today, it offered an unusual sensor, with a diagonal rather than a square grid pattern, then offered higher resolution and better low light performance than the conventional sensor in the Nikon.  Plus, even then, Fujifilm color science was better.

Needless to say, given my proclivities, I bought the Fujifilm.  And I have never looked back.

I followed that camera with the S3 Pro and S5 pro bodies.  In each case, the integration and sensors of the camera improved, but the performance was always a step behind the mainstream SLRs, in terms of functionality and at times, resolution. 

Eventually, when Fujifilm stopped making DSLRs, I drifted over to Nikon digital bodies.  I still have a D800E that serves me well when I need it.

Then, in 2011, I acquired my first X100.  Once again, it had wonderful picture quality, but now a beautiful design, and a gorgeous lens, but was slow, with unreliable autofocus.  This remained a pattern for many years with subsequent camera offerings including the X Pro 1 and XT1, both of which did not perform at a level of their immediate competition.  Happily, these cameras were improved significantly over time due to Fujifilm’s continual firmware updates.

But over time, this penchant for releasing immature cameras is changing.  I think it’s clear that the last round of product offerings, the XT3 in particular, for the first time are seen as a highly competitive, if not clearly superior products compared for instance, to the Sony, and Nikon equivalents.

Enter the GTX 100.  Now we have a product that literally leapfrogs, over its competition, offering huge resolution (100 megapixels), in a beautifully designed professional level body.  It is the first medium format camera with image stabilization, as well as video features that rival anything in this format.  Now the body is quite expensive, too rich for my blood, at $10,000. However its nearest competitor, the Hasselblad H6D-100c is $28,000 for essentially the same (though non-stabilized) sensor without talking about very expensive Hasselblad glass.   The Fujifilm GFX lens line is also very high quality but proportionally priced.  One can buy a very nice Fujifilm GFX 100 body and lens collection for significantly less than the price of the Hasselblad body alone.

It’s so much fun, as one who remembers the bad old days of weird Fujifilm cameras, to see the brand emerge as a major mainstream force in the industry.

I think we’re finally done with “frankencameras”.