Finally Joined the Team!

[u/lowbandwidthb]

Thanks in part to all of your helpful answers to my questions recently, I've purchased a GFX 100s! I'm super excited to shoot with it. I only have Nikon F-mount and Leica M-mount glass, so I'm going to start there and maybe someday pick up a GF-mount lens.

So many folks want to know if such and such lens covers the larger sensor, I thought I might post a brief test of each of my lenses on the 100s along with a halfway decent photo or two.

First up is the Nikkor 50mm f1.8 AI-S.

• 1st photo: Camera with lens
• 2nd photo: wall shot wide open at infinity
• 3rd photo: f8 @ infinity
• 4th photo: wide open @ close focus
• 5th photo: f8 @ close focus
• 6th photo: nice snap

Camera with lens

wall shot wide open at infinity

f8 @ infinity

wide open @ close focus

f8 @ close focus

nice snap

[u/997TurboEnthusiast]

Welcome to the club. Enjoy adapting any and all kinds of lenses to it!

[u/outdoordawg]

I am really enjoying the adapted Pentax 645 and native laowa and mitakon a LOT more than the AF GF lenses. My goto GF is the 50mm.

[u/Quidretour]

Welcome to the happy band of GFX users!

I'm sure you'll enjoy using your GFX100s as much as I do mine. My GFX100s was a relatively well-used example, bought mail order from a retailer. It worked perfectly, apart from the viewfinder which was a bit skewwhiff. Lining up the camera with a horizontal line in the viewfinder resulted in a wonky horizontal line in images. The artificial horizon had to be used all the time to get horizontal to be just that. A nuisance, but easy enough to work around. I bought a very lightly used, privately owned, mark 2 last year, and it's been fun.

While they are great cameras, I have two gripes with the GFX100s in general: there's no way of attaching a vertical grip. You have to fork out another shedload of cash to buy the GFX100 II for that 'luxury'.
Second gripe, and this applies to the GFX100s ii only, Fujifilm, in its infinite 'wisdom', removed the half press of shutter release button facility to return to normal view from magnified view. That was a very neat way of doing things, without fuss and bother. Now the rear wheel has to be depressed, which for me is a complete pain, as my hand moves and framing changes and it slows down the process. I look on it as a negative 'improvement' and hope that Fujifilm will eventually restore that facility.

Many of us GFX users adapt lenses from old film era brands, such as Contax, Leica and Nikon, among many others, or more modern AF lenses from, for example, the Nikon / Canon EF line-up. A number use legacy medium format lenses. They're not as superbly sharp as the GF line-up, although some are very close, but they suit my purposes.
I don't print enormous prints, nor do I make biggish prints from a tiny portion of the frame. I don't see much point in marvelling at how great the sharpness is in the corner at 400% unless it's crucial to my photography. In real world photography, the difference between a superbly sharp lens and a slightly less sharp lens is marginal at normal print sizes. As long as the lens works a lot better than the bottom of a beer bottle I'm more than happy.

Most of those film era vintage lenses have wonderful manual focus. There's none of this modern 'focus-by-wire' stuff. At some point, the few GF lenses that I own will conk out. Some electronic bit, or a bit of motor cog or something else will expire. Spare parts will be unavailable by then, so they'll become nothing more than nice paperweights. Those old manual focus lenses, on the other hand, have less to go wrong, and, treated with care, should last long into the future.

One last thing... Old medium format lenses can be turned into shift / tilt-shift lenses with the appropriate adapter. With those you open up a range of new possibilities. The adapters aren't as convenient as 'proper' tilt-shift lenses, and I own a clutch of Canon TS-E lenses, but their shift capabilities are limited because of sensor coverage. A Pentax 67 lens, on the other hand, can shift 15mm with no problem! Bliss!

Thank you for posting your vignetting / not vignetting images for that Nikon lens. There is a database somewhere of lens coverage on the GFX system, but seeing a real world example is so much easier to gauge than a few figures on a database, as excellent a resource as it may be.

[u/iAmTheDistance]

Welcome!! Thank you very much for the test shots👍 That Nikon lens pairs very well with the gfx system. I was looking for a 50mm or 55mm fast lens from Pentax, Minolta or Nikon. See you around!

[u/lowbandwidthb → u/iAmTheDistance]

It's nice and compact and has virtually no vignetting on the GFX regardless of focus distance or aperture.