Fujifilm GFX100RF Lack of IBIS Explained – The Problem is NOT the Bigger Camera Body

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One of the biggest critiques to the Fujifilm GFX100RF is the lack of IBIS, especially considering that it has a 100 megapixel medium format sensor.

So why has the Fujifilm GFX100RF no IBIS?

Well, that’s exactly what Thomas and Andreas asked the Japanese product managers of Fujifilm when they met them in Prague, who passed them the chart you can see above (video below).

Let’s take a look:

The important lines in the chart are the black diagonal lines. In that chart you can see that in order to get sharp images with for example a 250mm lens, you need to shoot at about 250th of a second.

On the very top (over the red line) we have the telephoto lenses that need OIS.

The purple on the left is the range where you need a tripod.

The yellow part shows where IBIS works best.

On the right we see the range that does not need IBIS and can be shot handheld without IBIS and yet get sharp images, and they marked the 35mmF4 in that range.

So, looking at the chart, I’d say that if you shoot at 1/40th of a second or higher, then IBIS would be of little use anyway.

And maybe in real world, you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of it. Test samples shared at the German fuji-x-forum.de look still sharp at 1/20th. So probably I personally would feel confident to go down to 1/30th, unless I am on my 7th coffee and my hands shake like crazy ;).

Also the leaf shutter helps to get sharper images, because it does not introduce as many vibrations as the mechanical shutter does.

One more tidbit about IBIS discussed in the video:

implementing IBIS would have made the camera bigger, but not that much.

Apparently the increase in body size would still be acceptable for Fujifilm. The problem would have been the lens, as in order to cover the entire sensor plus the area in which the sensor can move due to IBIS, the lens would have become significantly bigger. And since compactness was paramount for Fujifilm when developing the GFX100RF, they decided not to go with IBIS. The body size increase would have still been acceptable, but not the lens size.

And always keep in mind: whatever moves in your frame at very slow shutter speeds will get blurry anyway, as IBIS only compensate for camera shakes.

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