Fujinon GF 500mm F5.6 R LM OIS WR Review | Medium Format Gets Reach

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott, and I'm here to give you a look today at what is a very important lens for Fuji's GFX medium format system
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This is the new Fujianon GF 500 millimeter F5.6 R-L-M-O-I-S-W-R lens
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This lens shows that Fujifilm is serious about expanding the horizons for their medium format platform
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This lens focal length is twice as long as what was the previous longest available telephoto lens
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the 250 millimeter F4, available previously. And so this lens, I think, checks a lot of boxes that people have been looking for
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And the good news is that it arrives in a package that is, in my opinion, it's not too big, it's not too heavy
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And it's even not too expensive at around 3,500 US dollars. So is this a lens that is worth considering
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Does it make this platform a legitimate source to go to for wildlife or birding, things like that
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Well, maybe. We'll find out in today's review. So if you don't speak Fuji, let me just quickly break down what all of that means
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The R refers to the fact that it has an aperture ring. LM refers to the linear motors or the focus system
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OIS refers to the optical image stabilization, lens-based stabilization, and WR refers to the fact that it is a weather-sealed or weather-resistant lens
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Now, as noted, this lens, as you can see, it's big, but it's not incredibly big
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It is 104.5 millimeters in diameter. It is 246.5 millimeters in length. That's 4.1 inches by 9.7 inches
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because the mount is so large on medium format, I find that even the smaller lenses tend to be
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much bigger than what I would expect. And so this lens actually wasn't larger than what I expected
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because in many ways, the considerations for the larger mount in a big lens like this become less
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of a significant issue. And so in terms of a similar type lens for, say, a full frame camera
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it's really not all that much bigger. And the truth of the matter is
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is that the weight at 1,375 grams, about 3 pounds, is reasonably light weight
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I had zero issues hand holding this lens. Now, one caveat on that weight
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I put it on my own scale, and I found that I could get that weight, but only if I remove
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the tripod foot and the hood. And so obviously, the weight that they're giving is not including either one of those components
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So, yes, the actual tripod foot itself is very easily removable. I actually think this is a fantastic design
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you simply loosen the tension knob here. There is a release that you touch right there
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and then you can just pull that right off and away you go. And then, of course, mounting it in reverse
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is just doing the exact opposite and then locking that back down
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Very simple transition and I found it to be a very effective system
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I also love the fact that the foot here is ARCA compatible. And I don't know why other brands can't seem to do this
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But anyway, great to see that Fuji has nailed that here. So I really like that aspect
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The included lens hood itself, it is made of plastics, yes, but it does have the rubberized front surface
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It has a locking mechanism, and it has a window. If you want to use a polarizing filter, you have the ability to open that up and rotate that filter and get easier access to that
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Now, this is the most feature-rich GF lens that I have personally seen
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And so we've got a number of different aspects here. We have a focus limiter that allows you to choose
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between full range and then taking off the shorter part of the range
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So from five meters to infinity, there is a simple on-off switch for the optical image stabilization
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obviously it being a smart system that detects whether or not you're panning or not and adjust accordingly
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Underneath that, there is a switch that gives you some options when it comes to autofocus
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You can be an AFL mode with the ability to lock everything
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You can go into just normal AF mode. And in between those, there's a preset option
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and you can set that preset distance by using the set button that's underneath there
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and then you can just immediately go to that preset focus position
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by pushing any of the four different buttons that are towards the front of the lens
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at kind of the cardinal positions on the lens. So one's always easy, close to hand, and you can set a preset position
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That becomes useful if maybe you're shooting, say, a baseball game, for example
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and you're going to have a similar distance to the batter. And if you can do that, you can just very quickly go back to that and eliminate some of the guesswork and get some shots maybe that you might miss otherwise
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So certainly a welcome addition there. The aperture ring here is clicked
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There's no option to declick it. It does have one third stop to tent in between the full stops
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And then you have the option. If you press in this lock, you can move either into the automatic position where it's controlled from within camera or into the command position where you can control it from the command position where you can control it from the
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command ring. And so a few different options for controlling aperture there. The manual focus ring is
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nice and wide. It has a nice level of damping to it. Though frankly on Fuji, I found, I find
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manual focus simulation to be somewhat frustrating most of the time. This is one of the better
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applications, but I find that it's better for making small adjustments rather than trying to make
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major adjustments because then it just seems like you're rowing over and over. And so, you know
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it's good within that limited type of application. The lens is compatible with Fuji's 1.4 times teleconverter
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And so obviously that gets you out to a 700mm focal length
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So remember, all of these focal links are measured in the full frame. That's the standard
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And so you actually have to apply a crop factor here, which is not a smaller, but actually a larger crop
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And so in this case, rather than being, for example, Fuji's XF crop is 1.5 times
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Their GF crop is 0.79. So larger than full frame, which means that in full frame equivalency, this lens is right under 400 millimeters in its raw form and about 540 millimeters with the teleconverter attached
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Teleconverter, everything works fine here. It's also weather sealed, so it keeps up the weather ceiling
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I will note it's expensive, however. for that 1 times teleconverter That the most expensive teleconverter that I ever seen Overall the materials here are largely plastics And I think if there going to be any complaint about the build
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and maybe that some people find the build to be a little bit more plasticy than what they anticipated
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That's what I found. However, I think that the lens is going to be tough and durable
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At the end of the day, it's more about an impression and probably less about the reality of it
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But that's obviously part of how they've managed to keep the weight
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light and I probably also to keep the price at a moderate point. Overall I think that the
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build and handling is great here. I have no major complaints about anything here and I think it's a
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well-executed package for what it is. Now on the autofocus side of things it does have Fuji's
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linear focus motor and that is their superior focus system. The focus motor on the positives. The
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focus motor is nice and quiet, no issues with that. But as you can see here, it is not super
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fast and the problem is it still has to be paired to one of Fuji's focus systems and
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you know while they tout and they'll show you marketing material about how great it is as you can
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see in reality it's not fantastic and so the truth of matter is is that if you need to make major
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focus changes it is not fast or confident there'll be some pulsing it has a bad tendency in one
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direction to do a backwards focus rack and so that really slows down acquiring subjects so that
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means, as you can imagine, when I tried to do birding with it, there were sometimes some frustration
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and focus acquisition. So there's a lot of shots I didn't take because I just couldn't react
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quickly enough to get the bird in focus. So once I could acquire focus, it does have, you know
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and I was using the GFX 100 S Mark 2, which does have the X processor 5, which means AI tracking
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And so once the AI was able to start tracking the bird, it did a better job. As long as I could
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keep it fairly well centered. If it got towards the edge of the frame, it would lose focus
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And unfortunately, that's easier said than done with these bodies because there is significant blackout in between frames. So sometimes just trying to keep a bird in flight properly
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framed with a long focal length and some blackout in between shots, which means that there's
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some skill involved and obviously more skill than what I consistently had. So it will track
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reasonably well if as long as I would say you're tracking more in a vertical
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rather than something moving towards you. I found that when a subject was moving towards me
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like Nala, for example, I didn't get great focus results. Now, with slower moving targets or still targets
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I got great focus accuracy, beautifully focused, and of course, we're going to get to in a moment
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the lens produces gorgeous results. And so, you know, in optimal situations, you can do okay
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but this is still not really an action camera, and it's not really an action lens
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at least in this current configuration. And so it's hard to say what's lens and what's camera
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My kind of familiarity with the cameras here makes me think that it's probably more camera than lens
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which gives us hope that this lens can become even more useful. When and if Fuji really improves their autofocus systems in the future
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Now on the video side of things, video is basically best used for static shots
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or very slow moving shots. It can deliver beautiful looking footage, and obviously with serious compression and subject isolation
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And so I found that the footage looked great. But if the subject was moving, so here is Nala running towards me
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You can see that focus acquisition and video just never happens. And even with her walking, as you can see, tell enough to tell that the pace is slower
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but still no focus acquisition. And even when I started from a still shot here, I mean, initially it looks beautiful
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But as soon as she decides she wants to start moving towards me, focus is just lost
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And so it just isn't going to track action, particularly action, moving towards the camera
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I also found that I just couldn't do touch to focus. It just wouldn't happen
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If I tried to touch a different area, it just typically wouldn't react at all or react extremely sluggishly
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And so bottom line is that use the video if you have very narrow parameters of how much auto focus you need
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because that's about what it is able to accomplish. Now, fortunately, on a much, much more positive side is the image quality
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And I'll give you a detailed breakdown for those that are interested at the end of the review here
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This is an optical design of 21 elements in 14 groups that includes two super ED elements
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and then also five ED elements, extra low dispersion elements. And so we've got some exotic elements in the design
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And the MTF chart, as you can see here, looks amazing. Even when you go up to the 40 lines pair per millimeter measurement, you can see that it is just almost a straight line across
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Very, very impressive MTF there. And that's the way that things play out in the real world as well
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I'm testing on a 102 megapixels here. And so I was just impressed with the results I got
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As far as some of the technical things, as far as Vignette and distortion, on the distortion side, I saw just the tiniest bit of pincush distortion
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I corrected it with a minus 2, but there's no real need to correct it at all
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Likewise, with Vignette, it's a plus 32, which is just barely a stop
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We've got a 95 millimeter front filter thread here, and so obviously it's plenty big enough
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diameter coming in to where it allows for the sufficient light that's there to have very
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even illumination across the frame. So all of that is great. I also found that fringing was a non-issue, whether we're talking about longitudinal
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chromatic aberration, so no fringing before or after the plane of focus. And then also with
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a lot of chromatic aberrations at the edge of the frame, still perfectly clean there. This is
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beautifully corrected glass here. Excellent. I also found when it comes to testing sharpness that
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even at 200% on a 102 megapixel body, this lens is exceptionally sharp, wide open at F5.6. In fact
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what I found is that stopping it down really didn't improve things much. So I wouldn't stop it down
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unless you really need more depth of field. It's not a super bright lens
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You know, F5.6 is reasonably bright at this focal ink, but it's not incredibly bright
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And so, but it's bright enough that you, you know, you don't really want to stop it down
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and lose that light gathering potential. So shoot it at F5.6. I shot it there the vast majority of the time
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and I was delighted with the results that I got. I also found that image quality holds up quite well
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even with the 1.4 times teleconverter attached. And as you can see from these rural world shots it is nice and crisp plus If you do stop it down diffraction will start to become obvious after F F is a little bit softer even than F but then after that our minimum aperture here is F
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and you're going to notice a significant amount of softening due to diffraction on these high-resolution bodies at that point
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I also found that not only is the lens very sharp and with beautiful contrast, it also has very beautiful bouquet
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Now, I will point out that it's not that the specular highlights are all perfectly round
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You get some kind of lemon cat eye-eye shape near the edges of the frame with the specular highlights
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but it's more about the overall softness of the blur. If you're at close, you're going to completely compress away a background
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and it's just creamy or it looks like there's no background at all. But even at birding distances, I found that there's this shot here shows that there's just a nice soft back
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fall off towards the distant islands that are beyond in this shot
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And so I found like the bocette quality in all the different applications I saw
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I thought that it looked very good. Flair resistance is not often an issue with a lens that this long
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for the simple reason, with such a narrow angle of view, you're not going to often be filming right or shooting right into very bright light
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But what I did find, for example, shooting at more of a sunset time
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I saw no flare issues. and even when I was shooting where I was shooting into the sun
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and then the sun reflecting off of the water, very bright highlights there
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I didn't see any issue at all, no kind of flare artifacts. So overall, image quality here is fantastic
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So in conclusion, this lens, the GF 500 millimeter F5.6, is a very welcome addition to the GFX lineup
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Obviously, it expands the horizons of what is possible on medium format
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And while I think that the lens delivers, I'm not sure that the autofocus is quite there yet
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And these bodies, they still need more maturation. And I think some true hardware improvements when it comes to the actual autofocus
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And that's true across the Fujifilm lineup, unfortunately. And so I do think that this lens is going to become even more value in future iterations of the cameras
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that become more proficient at this kind of shooting. Right now, I still consider these lens, or these
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camera bodies to be better suited if you're shooting, you know, portraits, you know, landscapes
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architecture, things like that where you have either still or slow moving subjects. Action is still
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not a strength for that. And obviously, this is more of an action lens. And so you're going to have
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to, you know, crunch the numbers. But the reality is, is that if you develop good technique
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and you have a little bit more patience, I think you can get some fantastic bird or wildlife
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shots with this lens. But again, I think you're going to have to hone your technology. technique in a way that I simply don't have time to do over the course of a couple of week review
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period. And you need to spend longer time and develop more familiarity with the camera and the
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focus system and the lens. And I think with some patients, you can get results you'll be happy
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with, but it's just not as proficient as what I'm accustomed to on other platforms
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But when I'm just examining the lens itself, you know, taking autofocus out of the equation
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for a moment, I think that they've really executed the package well
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It's reasonably size, it has reasonable weight, and it has, I think, a reasonable price for what it delivers
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And the image quality is top-notch, beautiful. And so if you feel like you can work within the parameters that I've described
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I think that the Fujianon GF-500-millimeter F-5.5R, L-M-O-I-S-W-R, may be just the perfect lens for you
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I'm Dustin Abbott. If you want more information, you can check out the full text review that is linked in the description down below
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There's also an image gallery that is linked. There's buying links there if you want to move forward with a purchase
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And if you want a deeper dive into the optical performance, staying tuned with me right now, let's jump into that together
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So we'll start our examination by taking a look at vignette and distortion. So the first thing you might wonder is if I've got two of the same images here
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No, this is the before and that's the after, but there isn't a whole lot to correct here
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A very, very mild amount of pincushion distortion. I just used a minus two to correct here on the right side
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and I used just right over 30 plus 32 to correct for that little bit of vignette there
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You can see it's a really clean cleanup. So you can leave both of those things uncorrected and never even worry about it
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But fortunately, Fuji's correction profiles are excellent. I also noticed very good control of longitudinal chromatic aberration
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So if you're familiar at all with taking this kind of shot, this is a perfect opportunity to have fringing all over the place
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Very, very bright contrast areas here. and then going out of the depth of field
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You can see that's just zero issue there. It is very clean. Here's another shot
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Again, white blossoms. And then going progressively out of focus, you can just see zero fringing in that process
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Really clean. And look at the amount of detail that is there
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I mean, that is just fantastic. It's quite astounding to stand 10, 12 feet away
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and be able to take a shot that has this much detail in it. Likewise, when it comes to lateral chromatic aberration
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everything is very, very nice, very clean transitions from black to white
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You see no fringing in any of these areas. So zero concerns on that front
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Now, a quick caveat before I give you the chart test, for this particular one, because of having a longer focal length
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and because I wasn't set up at my other office, my main office for actually doing the telephoto test
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I set up my typical chart test outside. And so there are some extra variables, you know
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just when moving things around. Anyway, I just, this is going to be shown here at 200% magnification and then obviously
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on 102 megapixels. We're going to see that it looks fantastic, but I'm going to put more stock in real world
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shots for the simple reason that it gives me more, I think, consistent feedback than my chart
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test under the circumstance. So here at the middle of the frame, 200% magnification, lots of detail, lots of contrast
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no concerns there. Midframe looks fantastic. You can see good detail everywhere
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As we pan down here, I like to look at both sides of this bill
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And you can see it looks just as good on the lower right side as it does on the upper left
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If anything, I would say it's actually a hair better there. And then as we get down to the very edge, edge looks fantastic
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Likewise, if we pop around the world and just see about our centering, you can see very good results on the left side
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Into the upper left side looks nice and clean. and then into the upper right side as well Everywhere I look it all consistently good So how does that play out in the real world Well take a look at this Here at 100 magnification
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Look at the amount of detail and contrast that is there. I mean, that is just amazing
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You combine 102 megapixels of resolution with optics like this. I mean, just those individual hairs going all over the place
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Very, very impressive. Here is a shot of Nala. and you can see again just beautiful detail on the area of focus
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And here depth of field is just tiny at this kind of distance. So it literally is just around her eyelid and iris here
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You can see a very narrow plane of focus. So it's hard to even get much of a sense of sharpness
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because the depth of field is just so tiny. But in the very small area where we've got focus, it is very crisp
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This shot is a little bit better, a little bit more two-dimensional maybe
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But first of all, you can see that the bouquet looks fantastic, and then look at the detail there
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Just stunningly good. So really great. A little bit further away here, just a shot of a seagull on the beach
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And you can see that the amount of detail at this more of a medium distance, really, really fantastic
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Also in flight, obviously there's more variables there with the focus system involved, and it's not as competent here
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But you can see, I've got a really nice, clean-looking result with good detail
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on this particular frame, focus is great, and obviously the lens is going to deliver under that circumstance
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So stopping down from F5.6 to F8 in the chart test, and this is why I discount it a little bit
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it actually looks a little bit softer at F8. I don't really think that's actually the case
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That's not what I saw in my real world results, but I would say that you're not going to get much sharper
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than between F5.6 and F8, because diffraction starts to kick in after that
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But here's a real world F8 shot, and what's really fascinating about this shot
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is that it's not until I zoomed into a pixel level. And so first of all, let's just look at the contrast and the detail
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which is exceptionally good. But it's in the shot when I zoomed in. I noticed that somehow a frying pan ended out in the middle of a lake on these rocks
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Very, very small island for someone to camp on. So I don't know what that's all about
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but I had no idea that that was there when I took the shot. Here's another shot in profile
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and I want you to look at the overall just rendering here. So obviously you can see looking at the image that the colors are beautiful
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very shallow depth of field, beautifully blurred out background, and then if we punch into the actual details
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I mean, what more could you ask for? That is gorgeous. Now, the lens does have a minimum aperture of F32
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Diffraction is definitely going to take a knock out of sharpness when you get to that small of an aperture on 102 megapixel body
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So you can see F11 compared to F22 on the right. Pretty radical difference
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Now, you can see here looking at the histogram that this is what the 1.4 times attached
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So 700 millimeters and F8 is now the minimum, or maximum aperture, I should say
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You can see that even with the 1.4 times attached, the detail remains fantastic
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And that's, you know, that's really, really impressively sharp. And you can see here that, you know, I could ask for maybe a hair better focus
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I feel like focus is maybe somewhere in this zone rather than right on the iris
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But you can see that the detail remains really, really fantastic. So no complaints on that front
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Now your minimum focus distance is, I believe, 2.8 meters. And so you can see here that just with the native lens
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that really it's pretty good. I can see a very sharp crisp detail and contrast
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So no complaints there. And then one other interesting thing is if you're using the 1.4 times
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your minimum focus distance remains the same, but your focal length has become longer
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And so you can see that here we have about 0.20 times
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and that's going to jump up into more like 0.25, 0.26 times magnification when you put the 1.4 times on there
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Now, as alluded to previously, specular highlights are not completely round. You can see here that there's some deformation as you get off center
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And in this case, because the specular highlights are so big, there's only a few of them that are truly round
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But to put a little more context in there, if I throw a subject there with some of those specular highlights behind them, this is what it's going to look like
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And by the way, even with very bright backsliding here, you can see that, yeah, that looks really, really good
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Here's another shot that just kind of shows off the beautiful color and then, of course, great detail and contrast
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that this lens is capable of. You can see that even though these are all clustered quite close together
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that when you get up to here, the depth of field is still really, really shallow
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So we're out of focus by here, in focus here and down in here. Contrast in colors, though, are really fantastic
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I did find, you know, as far as just how the focus plays out, there's plenty of detail available here
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but you can see that with some of these other, a little bit more extreme subjects
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technically it can track, and it did have a green tracking on the GFX 100 S Mark 2
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but instead of nailing the eyes, you can see it's more the torso of the B there
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But still, I mean, obviously a pretty impressive overall result. Colors are fabulous, and this is something that I feel like Fuji Glass does really, really well
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and I continue to stand by that here. I think that the results look really, really beautiful
25:33
Boquet quality here is this shotgun stood out to me because it's not an optimal distance
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The bird is, was quite a distance away from me. And so then so the distance of the ratio
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you know, distance to the subject and then to the background is not profoundly good
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But you can see here that the boquet is still really nice and soft. So I like that
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Finally, flare resistance, we've seen a few images that were backlit. But you can see here shooting right into the evening sun
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that I was able to capture the nice big sun look that we really like with shooting a telephoto
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But without any kind of blobs of any kind of ghosting anywhere
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you can see just a couple of little tiny specks. But, you know, that could also, with this kind of range
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that could also actually be something that's more sun-related. And it could also, as you can see here, these are actually backlit insects flying in the air
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So it could be something like that too. But certainly not a ghosting artifact
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Very, very nice and clean. And so as you can see, this is a lens that really delivers in the optical department
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So as I said in my summation previously, if you feel like you can deal with the autofocus quirks that still are a reality in the GFX world
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then this is a lens that can deliver some gorgeous images for you. As always, thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in

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Fujinon GF 500mm F5.6 R LM OIS WR Review | Medium Format Gets Reach

Dustin Abbott