My first medium format lens, love Fuji.

At first, I will state I have never been a fan of zoom lenses. There are too many moving parts. With that, on to the review.

I performed a series of quick tests to see how well the zoom performed and was a little concerned about the 45mm end of this copy of the lens. I was going to return it, but after careful consideration I determined it was OK. There is softness in the corners that extend about 1-1/2" into the frame at the 45 focal length. It is not so soft that its bothersome, but its there. I own a 45mm prime and that lens' resolving power is phenomenal across the frame. Everywhere else in the 45-100 frame is just as good as the prime.

At 60-100, the lens performs flawlessly! It is very pleasing how well this lens performed at the standard to long end. Tack sharp to the corners. Beautiful.

I am very pleased. I should have bought this instead of the 45 prime. Its that good!

Lovely lens - a bit weighty - but sharp, OIS works well and makes life easy for slower shutter speeds. Just photographed my cat, hand-holding the 50R and 45-100 at 1/20th with OIS on and it was tack-sharp. I am impressed.

This lens adds the classic medium range zoom to the GF line up. Especially good for street and walkaround Well built and very sharp

These Fuji lenses are beasts in size, but if you are working in medium format, you have already accepted that aspect of these systems. It has an 82mm filter size. Just saying. Feels solid in the hand. Very smooth zoom and focus.

The OIS works a treat. I was able to handhold a 9/5 of a second exposure at f4 zoomed to 100 while sitting on the couch at night in a room lit by two table lamps, and got an acceptable image. Not a great image, but acceptable.

I love this camera and the lenses. I debated whether to sell the 32-64 that I bought with the GFX 50R and buy a 30mm as a stand alone wide angle, but in the end I just kept them both, even with the big overlap. They have different handling and image characteristics, and I'm a wide angle person that just needed a bit more reach. I wish Fuji made something like the Nikon 24-70. That would have been perfect, but they do not. Why not? FUJI, ARE YOU LISTENING?

People have said this lens is sharper than the 32-64, but I have not had that borne out in my travels. Coming from a background as an 8x10 film shooter, I have a thing about sharpness. They are both plenty sharp. I used it with a Fuji extension tube the other day, and it was really nice. Handles screw-on filters nicely. The petal hoods on all these lenses seem comical and pointless, but they work without vignetting at the widest setting.



You won't be disappointed, unless you find yourself wishing it were wider, like I found myself wishing the 32-64 were longer.

Amazing glass and cameras

Among the sharpest and overall best performing lenses I have ever owned. Construction is very solid with metal parts and beautifully engraved markings. The image stabilization is impressive. As seen through the EVF, motion simply stops. Way better that most other lenses. Sharpness is better than many primes I've owned and is up to the standards set by the other GF lenses. Obviously bokeh will not be as pronounced as with the GF 110mm f/2 for example but this lens is far more versatile. At f/4 with relatively close subjects there is lots of background separation and the quality of the bokeh is very good so it just depends on your needs. AF is quick and very quiet. I previously owned the the GF 32-64mm F/4 and it is also a very fine lens. For my purposes the 45-100mm focal length range is more useful and the image stabilization a big plus. For GFX 100 users the lack of IS with the 32-64mm would not be an issue.

For the past few years, my walk-around combination has been a Nikkor 28-300mm lens on a Nikon D850. I have loved the versatility of the big zoom range. But I bought the new medium format Fuji GFX100s which is fantastic (separate review) so I needed a lens for it, and Fuji doesn't make an ultra zoom (yet?) so I chose the 45-100mm as closest to the range I usually use.

The 35mm e quivalent of the Fuji 45-100mm is 36-79mm, so that sounds as if I'm giving up a lot at the top end. But in fact I'm not. Suppose I shoot an 11648x8736 image at 100 mm that includes a much larger image than the one I wanted, and then I crop out all but a 4928x3280 portion that is what I was after. I get the same image, with the same resolution, that I would have gotten shooting with the D850 at 236 mm. So in fact I am only losing the upper 64mm of my 300 mm lens zoom range. And at shorter focal lengths, I'm getting way better resolution.

But what I really want to talk about is the fantastic performance of this lens. I did my first few dozen pictures in a low light setting that mostly pushed the auto-ISO up to 12800, and I was expecting noise and maybe shake problems. But the images are fantastic - nearly noise-free, and the image stabilization kept them superbly sharp. This lens works wonders.

In operation it is fine. It is a bit bigger and heavier than my 28-300mm Nikkor, but not so much that it becomes a problem. The larger sensor requires a larger diameter lens, namely 89mm versus the 77mm of my Nikkors, and that extra glass makes it weigh about half a pound more. But that was not enough to make it unwieldy.

It isn't cheap, but it's in the same price range as eg the Nikkor 24-70mm. I may eventually buy its 32-64mm partner for wider shots. For now I'm just blown away.

Honestly, I haven't used this lens very much yet. But it's obvious the files it produces are excellent. I have no criticism whatsoever of this lens. If I didn't love my Fuji 100-200 zoom lens so much, the 45-100 would get much more use. My hats off to Fuji for their high quality lenses. Thanks to Fuji for the high quality products.

I recently used Lightroom to review my favorite photos taken at a location I shoot at frequently. I found it interesting that even when I was using zooms with a wider range of focal lengths the most common were right in the range of this lens. As I reviewed shots taken with the Fujifilm GF 32-64mm zoom I found that I was predominantly shooting at close to 63mm. This led to the decision to purchase the GF 45-100mm f/4 which covers roughly the full frame equivalent 36-79mm range.

As with all of the GF lenses the build quality and operation is outstanding. Metal construction with engraved markings, smooth zoom and focusing ring, although I rarely use manual focus. Focus is fast and accurate. Nearly silent too. Very sharp even wide open and at f/4 produces beautiful bokeh especially with closer subjects as expected.

The image stabilization is phenomenal. Substantially better than most other lenses with this feature.

It is a somewhat heavy lens but is over one pound lighter than my Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E.

Very happy with the purchase and with B&H as always.