Two Hot Shoes wrote in post #18810235
The GFX is pretty mature in terms of medium format, but when you compare it to a modern 135mm body it has slow AF and fps etc...
Not everybody wants or needs a camera that you can pretend you are in the middle of a dusty street at noon, waiting for someone to say 'draw'
There are currently 7 native lenses available with another three in development, as as mentioned a lot of 135mm lenses will cover the 44x33 sensor. €3464 + tax in my local shop to start shooting medium format. There is great value in that for a lot of photographers, like the ones that don't like to shoot in the dark or quick draw competitions...
The GFX 100s will have IBIS and 100% PDAF coverage as well as 4K30 4:2:2 10 Bit video. But that will cost about twice as much as the 50r does, but for those who need it, there you go, for those who don't but still want that IQ can stay with the affordable 50r. I guess it depends on what & how you want to shoot.
OoDee wrote in post #18810246So you're benchmarking against the entire DSLR/mirrorless market rather than the MF category specifically. That's what I wanted to understand. And in that case I can second your argument on immaturity. But to my knowledge, that goes for every single MF manufacturer in the market. Against its MF peers, GFX appears to be plenty capable and certainly not immature.
I'm also with you on the IQ. From what I've seen and tested (though only in very limited amounts) the difference between even the Ar7ii and the GFX is minor.
But as far rest of the feature set and specs go, I find limited value in a lot of the other things. I do put value on AF quality, but it's not huge. IBIS, quite frankly, is indifferent to me. I've never found myself in a situation where I though IBIS made a difference. My use of lenses is limited to rather few primes, though I've been flirting with the idea of going back to kit zooms. And high burst rates were never something I needed. Granted, I don't shoot sports.
So if I'm over simplifying it a little bit, for me it's all about the IQ in relation to price point. Technologically everything else is already "good enough" in the current days' camera market. And since we're talking about only minor improvements in IQ when going from roughly 2k (A7III) to 6k (GFX) in price, there's no way I can justify it for myself.
All in all, I still think we need to understand what benchmarks we're using talking about medium format maturity. They're not exactly mainstream cameras (yet).
It's more forward looking for me and not necessarily where MF is relative to FF right now.
To me MF is currently at the place was where the FF mirrorless was 7 years ago....and with the a7 cameras, the performance improvements in things like AF and even sensor performance improved pretty dramatically between generations, and at a very fast pace. I expect the trajectory of MF cameras to follow a similar trend. I rode the a7 train from the very beginning so I experienced first hand how expensive that can get. Much harder to ride that train though when a ticket at each stop is $6k. Better to jump on the train later in the life cycle.
I also think Sony will jump into the MF space sometime soon as they will have a harder to time differentiating themselves now that Canikon have entered the FF mirrorless space, because their FF have hit a mature point in the upgrade cycles, and because they are already making MF sensors for Pentax/Hasselblad/Fuji.
