Ignoring the hype, do photographers and credible reviewers have a consensus yet on this new, fixed lens model? Anyone care to attempt objectivity and boil it down for a FF user? Thank you for your concise thoughts. I see lots for sale on Fred Miranda.
Honestly, I haven’t even reached consensus with
myself, let alone other people. It is an extreme anomaly of a camera.
The long story short is this: I was intrigued, then excited, pre-ordered one, handled it, rejected it, hired one, came to terms with it, pre-ordered another one, bought it, and only a very short time later sold it.
There are some key events in there, easily the most significant of which is what happened between the last two items in the list: Fujifilm announced the X-E5.
For me as an amateur, the 100RF was on a new level of expenditure. Previously I had peaked at paying just over £2000 for a 50R body. (Plus another £1500 or something on the 23 and 50mm lenses, though I later sold those for pretty much exactly what I paid. For what it’s worth, I have zero regrets about buying the 50R: it is the most wonderful camera I have ever used and if it failed today I would immediately buy another.)
But I saw the 100RF as a replacement for X System. At my most-used view of 35-40mm equivalent, it would churn out 60MP which was more than enough, and it would also give me the option to capture 100MP at a wide angle for landscapes etc.
The handling suited me. It performed well—I was very pleasantly surprised by the AF—and of course produced great sharp images. I had no issue with it being f/4 without IBIS, in terms of its usable envelope, and I knew beforehand that it would be fine in that respect. Perhaps most importantly of all it has the best top-left viewfinder that Fujifilm offer. Only the 100RF and the 50R have big EVFs in the rangefinder-style location, and that is a big deal for me. It’s one of the key reasons I bought the 50R: nothing in the X System provides that EVF experience.
However, a few things didn’t gel with me. I always said from the time the rumours started that for me it would live or die based on how Fuji implemented the crop-zoom and the aspect ratios. I never expected them to deliver what I wanted; I set my expectations accordingly, which was fine.
But one thing I was not expecting: the fact that when you turn the camera on, the crop does not return to where it was when you turned it off. If I was in the 45mm crop, a power cycle would return it to the full sensor view. It seems a small thing, but for me it makes a fundamental difference in how the camera wants to be used: it is a 28mm-equivalent camera that offers a lot of cropping potential, but it is not a camera that can act as a drop-in substitute for another camera fitted with a 28, 35 or 50mm equivalent prime.
I had a problem with that; a problem which was exacerbated by the fact that an f/4 wide angle lens does not give much assistance in reducing the level of detail that the 100MP chucks out. (I was actually ok with setting the image size to “medium”, but of course the raw file is still an absolute tsunami of fine detail.)
As an aside: I realise that criticising the detail available in a 100MP medium format camera is on the face of it a ridiculous stance to take. But it’s more about how that detail is relentless and ubiquitous with no real devices to be able to suppress it. Often I want that detail. Other times I wish it would leave me alone. I would have developed some sort of strategy in time, I’m sure.
I am someone who finds that tools inform the process and the results: cameras and lenses both guide me in certain ways and what I come up with is a product of those influences almost as much as it is my own expression. So it’s important for me to feel comfortable with where a camera leads me. I found that it was an outstanding camera for X-Pan format at full resolution, but I also felt that at more conventional aspect ratios it took me to places I didn’t want to go, for much the same reason as I sold my GF lenses: the cleanliness and the level of detail worked in some situations but too much of the time led me to uninteresting or clichéd results.
None of which was to say that the 100RF was a bad camera, nor even that it wouldn’t have worked for me. I could have happily lived with it: I have the 50R and old lenses as my beloved antithesis of the ultra-high fidelity GF rendering.
But then the X-E5 was announced, along with a second pancake that was right in my window. Not 100MP, but plenty enough—and at 35mm equivalent actually pretty comparable with the 100RF. Smaller, lighter, some enticing usability improvements (not just the brilliant front lever inherited from the RF, but signs that Fuji is starting to understand recipes) and most of all a lot less expensive. Selling the RF so soon after buying it lost me nearly £1000; but I am not one to be drawn into the sunken cost fallacy, and replacing it with the X-E5 and the pancake put over £2000 back in my pocket.
So, in a very longwinded way, I think this alludes to one of the reasons consensus is so hard to achieve on this camera.
If you come at it from the medium format ground, it looks restrictive. It is restrictive. Of course it is. But it’s also small, incredibly nice to handle, discreet, and incredibly powerful. If you like 28mm equivalent, small and wieldy cameras, and highly detailed images, it is an absolute triumph.
If you come at it from the APS-C ground, it looks extremely expensive. And, from that perspective, it is. But it can—for many, but far from all, use cases—replace a lot of kit with one package, whilst delivering immense image quality at the wide angle. If you like 28mm equivalent, small and wieldy cameras, and highly detailed images, it is an absolute triumph.
The tricky thing with the 100RF is finding the right bit of a Venn diagram. That’s an inevitable thing for any fixed lens camera, but for a camera like this that sits in a chasm between two very different systems with very different users who have very different expectations, it’s even more true.
It is brilliant. But, at its price point, does it do enough to lift it above smaller formats? For some people, for the immediate future, sure. But it’s a real misfit. All the best things are.
(10x difference).
