As you might already know from my socials (FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM) Fujifilm USA has gifted me one of their most amazing camera, a GFX50S, a GF 50mm f 3.5 LM WR and they also gave me the chance to try all their lenses in the desert outside Las Vegas.

 

It was a great experience and also a great way to try my new gear with their technical support and with a very cool location available in Nelson Ghost Town, Nevada.

Of course I could not wait for the next day when I got the camera so I went through all the menus and honestly, coming from Sony gear, it looked simple, clean and easy to use (also because I already had 2 fuji mirrorless camera in the last 5 years).

When we get to the location we already had some time to talk about the system, the lenses and some tricks since we had a 40 minutes drive from Las Vegas (luckily for us on a very cool limousine with lights, champagne and music) so we were ready to shoot.

 

The first lens I tried was the Fujifilm GF 120mm f4 LM OIS WR Macro and it looked really good, autofocus was fast enough for portraits (anyway I would not suggest this system to shoot fast moving subjects with tracking, it’s meant for different stuff), stabilization helps with such big files to avoid blur, no chromatic aberration, very sharp and I think it has a good very overall color rendition and compression. Colors definitely looks great but this is always great with Fujifilm lenses.

Then I switched to Fujifilm GF 63 f 2.8 R WR and it looked very similar as performace, not too slow when focusing in good light, no hunting,  no chromatic aberration and sharp.

I think that all the GF lenses looks great as construction, color rendition and sharpness, that’s the Fuji style.

 

Let’s talk about the body, the Fujifilm GFX50S:

obviously it’s way bigger than my usual full frames cameras since it hosts a medium format sensor but its handling is really great and I felt very comfortable using that and, since you can customize a lot of buttons, the experience you have while shooting is always very good.

Files are really great, a lot of dynamic range (I would say slightly more than 3rd generation sony cameras but that’s already a high standard) and they have a lot of details, that’s really impressive. Of course the files are huge due to the 51 mpx sensor capacity but you can use loseless compression of raw files if you need it.

I really appreciated the colors that you can find on raw files without too many tweaking, that’s really nice to start with good skintones if you are into portraits.

 

One important note for Lightroom users, this is not an X-Trans sensor, it’s a “classic” bayer filter one so you have no problems at all handling raf files, sometimes Lightroom struggle with x-trans sensor files but you do not have to worry about GFX50S files.

I found raw files very tweakable and that’s a good thing for my editing, I really appreciated them.

I don’t think I would ever shoot JPEG on this camera but, as usual, Fujifilm has a lot of good film simulations so you can get really good results also straight out of camera.

I think that the only issue was the battery since it lasted about 350 shots, you would need some spare ones.

To be honest I have not tested the flash system so I cannot check about synchro and TTL but I am confident it’s good anyway (I will update the article once I have the chance to use it with a flash)

 

I really appreciated this gift and I really had fun with all the Fujifilm US team, they are an awesome group to hang with (special thanks to Victor!) and I can’t wait to shoot more with this amazing system.

 

here’s just a few pictures from that amazing day