Fuji GFX 100 First Shots: Time to see for yourself how close 102mp can really get you!

camera preview comparison first shots gfx 100 gfx 50s image quality lab samples

posted Friday, May 24, 2019 at 1:58 PM EST

Oh my... 102mp on a huge Medium Format BSI chip with 16-bit RAW file capture? The light gathering potential staggers the mind... (even Ansel Adams is considering a switch from film!) But seriously, folks... we've been doing some light gathering in our lab lately with the recently arrived GFX 100 on your behalf, and now have our signature lab First Shots series to present for your pixel-peeping inspection.

The GFX 100 Still Life images now available from our lab were taken with "beta-level" firmware and are therefore not technically "production" grade. However, since our friends at Fujifilm were kind enough to allow us to post these, we're confident that they are quite close to production-level indeed. We already loved the images from the GFX 50S and 50R models, and so it's going to be intriguing to analyze images from the GFX 100 in side-by-side fashion against those models and others with relatively high native resolutions.

For the natural explorers among you, feel free to dive right into our GFX 100 Lab Samples tab to go ahead and peruse and pixel-peep our Still Life images across the available ISO range. And of course you can view our GFX 100 images side-by-side against the competition and predecessors in our handy Comparometer. (After selecting your initial image, click again to bring the file up in your browser window to 1:1 resolution. And since 102mp brings you so close, just be careful not to cut your nose on one of the bottle caps from our test target. ;-)

So... just how much closer can you get with 102mp than the 51mp from the GFX 50S/R? Let's take a look! (I've put the 42mp Sony A7R III in below these, for a slightly more "common" resolution comparison.)

Fuji GFX 50S • 51mp • ISO 100 • 1:1 crop

Fuji GFX 100 • 102mp • ISO 100 • 1:1 crop

Sony A7R III • 42mp • ISO 100 • 1:1 crop

Of course, the current playing field for 100mp cameras is very limited, and we only have one other in our Comparometer at present, in the form of the far more expensive Phase One XF IQ3 100MP. Let's take a look now at the same crop at base ISO from the Phase One.

Phase One XF IQ3 100MP • 101mp • ISO 50 • 1:1 crop

That's a quick look at the resolution potential from a few key related players alongside the new GXF 100. We'll certainly be analyzing image quality as ISO rises as well, but will be saving our deep inspections for images shot with production-level firmware. Stay tuned for much more to come from our lab and the field once we receive it!