[Music] Howdy again, everyone. I've been working on my medium format tests recently, especially as Fujifilm have very kindly provided me with one of their new GFX 100s Mark II cameras for a couple of weeks, so let's test the living daylights out of

it. It's a 102MP medium format digital camera which uses their GF Mount lenses. It's an update to their original GFX 100s camera with improved displays, autofocus, and in-body stabilization, but really I see this newer camera as basically being a smaller, slightly

stripped down GFX 100 Mark II, as it contains most of that camera's excellent technology. It's handily smaller, has fewer video shooting modes, but at $5,000 or £5,000 here in the UK, it costs $2,000 less than its bigger cousin. I

love that. So for most people, it's quite possible that this will be the medium format camera for them. The main advantages of medium format are its enormously high resolution images, its pleasant 4x3 aspect ratio, admittedly not for everyone, and the beautiful out-of-focus backgrounds. Its big sensor can offer the disadvantages are its large size, especially the lenses, and high cost. I'd like to thank Fujifilm UK for lending me this camera and a couple of lenses for a couple of weeks for testing, although as usual, this is a totally

independent review. The camera itself is obviously on a large size, but as I mentioned, at 883g, it's now just about small and light enough not to be a burden to carry around with you, although of course, those Fujifilm GF lenses can

be a bit of a pain to carry around with you as well.

get pretty big This would be a nice camera to use with their smaller 50mm f/3.5 lens though Anyway the camera still feels fantastically solid and this Mark 2 offering now features  Bishmen Tech body paneling which feels lovely and

tactile while looking good too It's well weather sealed as well It's an SLR style camera with a very high quality 5.76 million dot viewfinder on the top that's down from the GFX 100 Mark I's 9.44

million dot viewfinder But honestly it's difficult to even tell the difference They're both so sharp and detailed It has a magnification of 0.84 times again lower than the more expensive GFX 100 MK II but still plenty big enough It's

really quite large to look through I quite like the way the camera handles although it's definitely catering for those who like customization It has one customizable button on the front and three on the top along with customizable menus and screen swiping Something particularly attractive is the large and

high resolution screen on the top which can light up brightly and offers tons of information This 100 S2 though does have a couple fewer customizable buttons than the 100 Mark I on the rear We get an 8-way auto focus joystick and an AF-ON

button as well as a pressable thumb dial to match the one on the front With a little practice there really are no problems controlling this camera at all although having said that the autofocus joystick did feel a bit squidgy not all that easy to press sometimes the screen

It's bright and very high resolution with pretty accurate colors. It can tilt up and down, but that's it. It cannot be folded out or flipped out to face the front. Thanks to the camera's fast processor, it's quick and easy to browse and examine your 102-megapixel images and go

through all the menus. The camera uses Fujifilm's NPW 235 battery, which provided me with a decent amount of use, probably about 600 shots at least, depending on how you use it, of course. I got to record over 90 minutes of video on

a single charge. Usefully, the camera can be charged via USB-C. Another difference between this and the more expensive GFX 100 MK II is that there's no CFexpress card slot this time. You just get two SD card slots, which will slow things down a

little, but at least there are two of them. Above that, there's a hidden flap with a port for a remote control. On the other side of the camera, there's a flash sync port, as well as microphone, headphone, USB-C, and a micro HDMI port. The

camera can actually double as a USB webcam, imagine that. The camera's menus are reasonably well thought out and quick to navigate, and the camera is packed with shooting features, including JPEG or HEIF image capture, as well as raw files in compressed, uncompressed, and lossless modes.

And we also get Fujifilm's rather dizzying array of JPEG picture effects, tone curve settings, and beautiful film simulations, including gorgeous Acros black and white, Bleach Bypass, Classic Chrome. Oh, they all look gorgeous, especially on those medium format images, and they're all available in movie mode.

We're talking about movie mode. The camera is reasonably well-featured here, although fans of shooting at 60 frames per second will be disappointed. It can shoot in 4K at up to 30 frames per second or 1080p at 60, so that's not very

fast if you want to shoot in ProRes format or in 12-bit raw. Then you can do that with an external recorder attached via HDMI. Otherwise, you can shoot in h264 and h265 up to 10-bit and in F-Log 1 and 2 if you want, if you like grading

your footage. This is probably where the biggest difference from the GFX 100 Mark II comes in, with a more expensive camera offering 8K shooting and 4K at 60 frames per second, so more serious video makers should take note of that difference.

Image stabilization in video mode was excellent, though, even when shooting with very long camera lenses. The camera is able to capture still shots at up to 5 or 7 frames per second. The buffer lasts a really long time if you're just shooting JPEG, about 180

shots. Shooting uncompressed RAW and JPEG together, I could only get about 16 shots off before the buffer ran out, or 22 shots with compressed RAW images, and the buffer would take a good 25 seconds to write all of that onto my pretty fast SD card. So that's where the speed of a

CFexpress card would have come in handy. My gosh, the noise that large shutter makes without a lens on the front. It sounds like the end of the world itself is coming. There are, of course, silent electronic shutter shooting modes as well. The camera's maximum flash sync

speed is only 1/25th of a second for standard flash equipment, although it is compatible with high-speed sync equipment as well. Uh, if you have anything like that. Oh, and a 400 megapixel 16-shot pixel shift mode is available for owners of very steady tripods. Honestly, I've

never had much luck with these high-resolution shooting modes. The end results are always really mixed, and even the most minuscule movement causes image quality issues. Anyway, let's move on and take a look at autofocus. And I was very pleased with this camera's autofocus capability, although Fujifilm

are still just a little behind its competitors in outright stickiness and accuracy. Still, they are getting there, and the amount of subject detection options are great to see. I found the camera's AI working very nicely to find whatever subject it was in my image, and

I was largely only limited by the speed of the autofocus motor of whatever lens that I was using. It was very good at detecting birds, although its speed struggled with catching birds in flight. But the autofocus worked just as well in movie mode, which is just as encouraging.

It'll never be a camera for sports photographers though, for example. Oh, and of course, this camera features in-body stabilization, which does a fantastic job for unstabilized lenses in stills or video modes. So that's the camera's build quality and features. Let's take a look at image

quality now. We'll start with RAW versus JPEG. And on the left, we can see that the RAW image is absolutely packed with amazing detail and beautiful color graduation. The JPEG images are a little softer, but not far behind. If we look to the left a little, we can see that blocks

of color are looking very nice here also that JPEG engine could be sharper but apart from that the image is looking beautiful okay let's look at high ISO noise levels while this is a medium format camera the extremely high resolution of over 100 megapixels should

cancel out that size advantage and to my eyes we are seeing about the same noise as on a top-of-the-line full-frame camera here so ISO 100 to 800 looks fantastic to my eyes ISO 1600 introduces a touch of noise and fine detail is starting to

get a little suppressed from ISO 3200 to 12,800 fine details progressively suffer more and more and at 12,800 noise becomes a clear problem too oh and here you can see the highest ISO levels actually I'd say that 25,600 is just barely usable just

although I wouldn't bother going any higher than this so as I mentioned you're basically getting the noise levels of a decent full-frame camera here but with the extra 102 megapixel detail that medium format can provide well I'm not complaining at all one of the

camera's best image quality features is its awesome dynamic range the best I've ever tested quite frankly you can really push those shadows and pull back those highlights and still get spectacular results although of course raw files look way better than JPEG when you do so

okay let's take a look at video quality now we will start in 4K where the camera's footage is detailed and up to ISO 1600 very low on noise although we're seeing some unpleasant artifacts in fine details here especially when shooting water ISO 3200 is still looking

reasonably good but 6,400 and 12,800 really lose out on detail. Tail shooting at 21° Centigrade, I couldn't get the camera to overheat at all while shooting video. I'm pleased to say let's take a look at the camera's rolling

shutter during video work. When shooting at 4K, rolling shutter is pretty disastrous here, as you can see. Switched down to 1080P and the rolling shutter effect is reduced, but certainly still around. Overall though, I loved testing the GFX 100s Mark I. I loved the images

it produces, even straight out of the camera. They are packed with detail and a decent enough high ISO noise performance. The auto white balance was almost always correct. Colors looked lovely in most situations, but I did find that I often needed to compensate the exposure

upwards just a little bit. An issue I've come across before in Fujifilm cameras. The autofocus system is good enough and the camera itself is quite fast, intuitive and customizable to use. Still, those 102 megapixel images though, and that amazing dynamic range, this

certainly has to be one of the best landscape and studio cameras around now. Medium format is not for everyone, not least because of its high cost and ginormous lenses, but the GFX 100s Mark II is a good deal. You're getting 90% of

what its bigger cousin, the GFX 100 Mark II, can do but in a pleasantly smaller, slightly lighter body and for £2,000 less money. You can't ask for much more than that. And long may the trend continue of Fujifilm's GFX cameras

getting smaller and less expensive. If medium format is what you want and you don't need high shooting speeds or 8K video footage, then this camera easily comes recommended. Thanks for watching everyone, and I'll be reviewing a bunch of Fujifilm's GF lenses over the coming

months, alongside all the other camera systems I cover. In the meantime, if you regularly watch these reviews and find them helpful, then check out my Patreon page where supporters get all kinds of exclusive bonus content. Follow the link in the description below, and ciao for

Fujifilm GFX100S II camera review

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