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#554. The Monday Post (30 Jan 2017) – GFX Porn ? Whatever …
By pascaljappy | Monday Post
So, Paul’s been rather quiet about gear lately. Serenely content with his XPro-2 and lovely sprinkling of fabulous lenses. While I’m huffing and puffing my anger at over complexification, quality issues and creativity downers, he’s playing it cool.
Then, suddenly, when my blood flow has returned to normal levels, he drops this bomb : Jonas Rask’s amazing review of the Fuji GFX. Short, opinionated, sweet and peppered with fantastic photographs, just as it should be. Evil, right?
Drat, that’s me all worked up again.
The thing with technical reviews is that they give you a sense of potential improvements to come. 14 stops dynamic range? Someday we’ll have 15. 42 Mpix ? Just wait 6 months for 72 to come along. 8 frames per second? 12 will be the norm next year.
Not that anyone should care about such tosh. But most do. And, in spite of my public fighting of this debilitating tendency, I am not totally immune to it myself (colour depth is my fetish …)
But Rask’s presentation deals in absolutes. It comes from a man who knows his way around a camera better than Trump around a bad idea. It hits you hard with photographic evidence that nothing the APC or full-frame competition will throw at us in the coming years will come close (whatever the fancy numbers, patents and lab tests may suggest). I appeases your mind about the future-proofness of this semi-colossal investment. And about the real-life usability of the camera.
It makes it clear that, however good this unedited view of the rising sun out of my window looks in term of highlight management and colour, the GFX will do it better. And more pleasantly, judging by the ergonomics.
And that’s just painful. With numbers, you can always justify waiting. With sheer beauty, the urgency feels a lot stronger.
Then, you stop looking at the photographs, read the text, and have to sit down when you realise the photographs on the page are mostly unedited jpegs. Gob. Smacked. Hard.
Even the usually soothing Mike Johnston can’t help but pour oil onto the fire:
Anyway I can imagine the GFX-50S being the “yin” to the iPhone’s “yang.” The flip side of the same coin, the other end of the same stick.
Amen brother ! My thoughts, exactly. Finally, someone else sees it. Could it be the ultimate bag now looks like this : your phone and a GFX ? While we’re dreaming, I’d probably pop-in a Fuji X-T20 in the middle, as the real everyday shooter mid-sizes sensor jack of all trades. But filling in the middle is less important than stretching the envelope.
So, is that goodnight Mr Full-Frame Sony ?
Probably not. Ambassador reviews, however tempting, are one thing. I remember how worked up I was about the X1D just a few months ago, before hands on reviews revealed the less than brisk operation and other issues. Real life use and advantages are another.
Besides, two articles have already dampened my excitement. The first by Blair Bunting, who lets us in on a little secret : 50Mpix is old-school. 100 is the new black. Numbers again, you see 😉 But no, not pixel count, sensor area. Maybe, if I wait a little more, the larger sensor size will find its way into affordability-town ? (hint: not in this decade, it won’t).
And far more seriously, Arctic Landscapes: Science Meets Art at Earth’s Northern Tip. Jean Gaumy’s magnificent images of the far North are here to remind us how unimportant all this gear talk is relative to just being there with a great vision and a boat load of talent.
Gaumy doesn’t mention gear a single time. If he did, the focus would probably be on surviving at mind-bogglingly cold temperatures (a task which neither my positively twitchy A7rII nor its positively heat-loving owner would be much good at). I hope Gaumy’s photographs help save the Arctic in the long term. For today, they’ve saved my wallet from a world of hurt and freed my mind from a world of GAS. And that’s something.
PP – just a few words
Line up the question boxes and along comes my colleague, ticks them all in a single pass. This is exactly the content we wanted the Monday Post feature.
And now, all that’s left for me to say today is that I agree. I think that many non-MF cameras are beginning to cluster around the 24 mpix sensor sweet spot and it’s hard not to ask whether we’ve now begun to understand that it’s enough.
Inter alia, you’ll find offerings from Sony, Pentax, Leica, Fuji, Nikon and to a lesser extent, Canon. There’s a full DearSusan post in there, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Kelp
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Sigh – human beings are one of God’s less successful inventions – no matter what we have, we seem to be incapable of ever being happy or satisfied. My dog is much more agreeable.
I believe I have mentioned this before – Ken Rockwell (in one of his reviews) was discussing the Great Chase for more and more pixels, and at one point, it seemed to me reading his discussion that he got exasperated and fired a bit of heavy artillery straight into the midst of the Pixel Chasers. As best I can recall now, what he said was this.
1 – For normal purposes, a sensor with 16MP will provide an image which is quite sharp enough. At the time he was writing, that was pretty much what most pro’s were using (eg a Nikon D4).
2 – If you are so damn keen on being able to create a tack sharp image the size of a bed sheet, go buy yourself ANY medium frame camera and pick up a cheap second hand lens on E-Bay, and it will outperform any full frame DSLR on the planet. I’m not altogether sure if this is still true – but I’d be hard to convince, that he’s not making a very good point about this fanatical pursuit of more pixels, when I see the photos Ming Thein produces with his Hasselblads – I’ve yet to see a photo taken on a DSLR that comes within a bull’s roar of the clarity of Ming’s photography.
And I’d like to add one more:
3 – Unless you can afford to employ an Indian porter to lug all your gear around, wherever you are, it’s nonsense to imagine that you can cart a handy little mirrorless, AND a nice half frame DSLR, AND an even nicer full frame, AND a MF, AND all the lenses and accessories you’d want. Most of us would have to sell the house to pay for all that much gear, anyway. Airlines would turn you away, unless you wanted to pay a fortune for excess cabin luggage. And photography would become a burden, instead of a pleasure.
Personally, I have never printed anything larger than A3 and I’m as happy as I was the day my wife and I strolled out into the sunshine, after we were married, onto the bank of the Seine, to take our wedding photos with the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero fountain as backdrops, with the gear I have right now.
Would I like a MF cam? Probably – but storage would be a problem – anyway I don’t have the cash to buy one, so the question is academic.
Don’t I appreciate this standard of gear? Of course I do – I also like driving high performance cars, like Lambos, but I don’t have them either (although if I have to tell the truth, I’ve had half a dozen sports cars in the past – not Lambos, perhaps – but VERY nice cars).
And it is possible to sit back and enjoy the photos that other ‘togs produce with this gear, without lusting after owning one yourself.
I currently shoot with 24MP or 36MP and – for fun – with 12.8MP on my Canon PowerShot. I lust after the D5 (but it’s not going to happen for me), because it has better AF, much better low light performance, and if you know what you’re doing, it’s faster. And then I get a reality check – apart from money, what use is “better AF”, when I shoot mainly manual?
I read a while back about Brand X introducing a blazing new 55MP sensor, and within days, there were reviews making negative observations about the lack of punch and clarity in the photos it produced – suggesting you’d do better with a 36MP cam. And when I dug into that story, it seemed to me there were sound technical reasons for that appraisal of the new “king of the pixels”.
So – if I have any advice to offer, it’s “be happy” and “be creative”. Leave the Great Chase to the victims of the pandemic of GAS (AKA “gear acquisition syndrome”).
As to whether you stay with smaller sensors or step up to medium format, that’s a person choice – my own point of view on that one is that few people are likely to do both, because my own experience of it left me with the feeling it was a different style of photography – once I had a cam with a 9cm square format, my beloved 35mm Zeiss Contarex had an extended holiday, and although I believe Ming has smaller cams, I can’t recall seeing anything he’s shot, except those startlingly sharp Hasselblad shots of his.
If you do want MF, there hasn’t been a better time to buy a decent MF camera since the days we could choose between Rollei, Hasselblad and Bronica.
Well, as much as I enjoy Ken Rockwell’s provocative realism, I’m not sure I agree entirely with his analysis. Down-sampling from (a good) 36mpix image will create a sweeter web-sized image than from 12mpx. Is that enough of a difference to justify the huge expense of a GFX? Certainly not. Plus, more pixels often implies lower quality pixels, as your 55mpix story illustrates.
Small sensors and large sensors do indeed create different styles of photography. That’s really how to look at it and the reason (for some people) to have several sensor sizes in the bag. The phone + medium format are such a huge gap that the difference will be very obvious, justifying having both. Whether MF vs FF will produce such an obvious difference is a whole lot more debatable. But early users seem super happy. We shall see. Considering the price differential, the difference in style had better be huge 😉
My guess is that a little creativity and hard work will make a more visible difference at a cheaper cost. But, hey, gas is hard to contain, right?
I get a buzz out of all three of my cams – broadly speaking, they are 12MP, 24MP and 26MP. Yes there are differences in things like clarity/sharpness/whatever – but used as intended, they all take “good photographs”. I’m perfectly happy to sit back and enjoy someone else’s “better photographs” – it doesn’t bother me in the least, that someone else has “better gear”, because what I have is what I chose to have – what I wanted, in other words.
When you find yourself discussing these issues with someone who has set out to buy “the best possible” everything, it’s a bit like listening to Donald Trump saying what a clever person he is. I prefer people like that to sit somewhere else, to be truthful – it’s another variant of snobbery, and I loath snobbery in all its forms. As you say, a little creativity & hard work make a more visible difference, at a cheaper cost !!
Ha ha 😉 Exactly.
The thing is: is it really about the best possible ? What I’ve been trying to convey with my Smartphone articles and others is that difference sensor sizes give different looks that are very difficult to emulate via software. It’s not a question of quality but aesthetics. Some photographers, many in fact, love super sharp looking photographs. In the Sony universe, they adore the 55/1.8, which leaves me stone cold in most situations. Whereas the Otus (leaving price differences aside) give a much more gentle style to the image. So do larger sensors. But, still, it’s all too easy to get caught up in all that and forget what’s really important : visualising, composing, processing … Much cheaper and much more gratifying.
Bother – did it again – second last paragraph, first line – “. . . that’s a personal choice . . .”
I think I need a refresher course in English 🙂 Or perhaps I can persuade Pascal to adjust the website, so that we can go back in and edit our comments, after they are posted, if we see a glaring error in them.
No you can’t 😉 It would be a lot of hard work to change this. I am however considering the possibility of transforming DS into a community site. That would solve the comment edit issue and more 🙂
I realized that a GFX and three lenses was in reach for me budget wise. Tempted like many did an analyze:
– Size matters (tonality, detail). Area difference APS to this mini MF is 3.6 times = significant. “FF” to mini MF is 70% larger = noticeable.
– Sitting with an A7R2; is the difference really worth the money? Would it be better to get better lenses instead? Those GM lenses are big, but a GFX system would be even bigger and heavier.
– Is the GFX a better camera (usability, performance)? Unknown today. Those early marketing/Fujista hallelujah style “reviews” are nonsense. Many like to diss Sony: “A computer, not a camera”. The truth is all cameras are computers in its core. Image quality is highly depending on the core imaging code. Fujifilm are the ones that cook RAW files most. Usability: How big difference? Probably a bit better than Sony A7xx. What is that worth?
– The gear are never more than just tools like hammer and saw. I do not expect ever to see and use a camera that is perfect in every sense.
– To me a GFX system is not worth its money compared to continue invest in my Sony A7R2 system. The GFX would deliver better detail and tonality – a plus. It would mean a bigger and heavier system – a minus. A heavy investment, can but 2-4 top class lenses for the Sony for less money. In the photo school (1960’s) the teacher once said: Spend less on camera housing and more on lens! Still true!
Per, it’s like hearing myself think 😉 Those are the questions that have been going through my head and, probably, through the heads of many others.
I think the Fuji lineup is super intelligent. An APS camera makes a huge step from a Smartphone without breaking the bank. And the GFX is a very significant step from APS. But from FF, not so much … The “GFX challenge” videos are largely uninteresting. How can Fuji think that will inspire anyone to buy a camera system? But some reviews do seem to point to something very special, as if the GFX was shooting above its weight.
I own an Otus 85 and Hasselblad 150 that can both be excellent on the GFX, so the investment in lenses would be minimal to begin with. And the future 35mm “equivalent” could be a stunner. But I don’t want to focus my energy on gear anymore. If independent reviews confirm that the GFX is really special, then we’ll see. For now, the A7rII remains king of my hill as of yours 😉
You can get the same resolution and very close technical qualities (dynamic range, noise, colour depth) from current full frame sensors, but with higher frame rates, faster AF, more lenses, better flash support… etc etc.
Just search the net for the DX0 results for the Pentax 645Z (tested, withdrawn, reported all over the ‘net) – and then compare to state of the art full frame.
If you want the absolutely best test results by all means buy one of the cameras with this sensor.
If you want a more flexible tool that can do almost anything, but a full frame camera and don’t worry about it.
When it was announced at Photokina, Fuji said the GFX would be affordable, competitively priced, a rival to full frame.
Then, several months later, the price is quietly announced and its the same as the Pentax 645Z with the same sensor, and a little cheaper than the Hasselblad.
But it’s ok, to keep the faithful, it’s possible that another camera in the range could be priced to rival full frame, says Fuji (deja vu to Photokina, no?). Full frame price… so it that £1,500 or £5,000?
As ever, they play a good game with social media product placement, gushing uncritical reviews by people given free equipment, and lots of double-speak marketing.
Given their X system, it may well have huge discounts and cash back offers by Christmas, but at the moment their promise of “affordable” (sort of) medium format hasn’t come true, in my opinion. The sensor is very good, everyone knows that from the Pentax 645Z, so the issue becomes the camera that it’s fitted to and the system that camera belongs to. At least it’s not an X Trans sensor.