A Medium Format Camera in Berlin

The beginning of the end for my Fujifilm GA645Zi can be traced back to Berlin in mid-2024. After spending several miserable days confined to a hotel room with COVID, my final evening brought just enough recovery to venture outside. Alexanderplatz seemed like the perfect place to stretch both my legs and the shutter of a camera that had travelled with me for the better part of a decade.

The GA645Zi is an unusual machine. It’s a medium format point-and-shoot from 1998 that somehow combines professional image quality with the appearance of an oversized family holiday camera. It shoots 6×4.5 negatives, which may be the smallest of the medium format options, but they’re still enormous compared to 35mm film. That extra real estate gives your photographs an incredible amount of detail while still allowing a reasonably compact camera to accompany you on your travels.

Of course, not every photograph from Berlin was a masterpiece. That’s partly because photography is an excellent way to discover your own shortcomings on a regular basis, but the camera itself deserves some of the blame. On paper, the specifications don’t exactly inspire confidence. The 55-90mm zoom translates to roughly 34-56mm in 35mm terms, with only four zoom positions to choose from. At the long end, the maximum aperture falls to a leisurely f/6.9, leaving very little room for low-light photography while still giving you all the opportunities for camera shake that come with a 90mm lens.

Despite those limitations, the lens itself is astonishingly sharp. The GA645Zi was never a cheap camera, and while the body feels disappointingly plasticky, the negatives it produces are spectacular. Zooming into the scans reveals detail that seems almost endless, reminding you why photographers continue to pay increasingly eye-watering prices for these cameras today. I bought mine around ten years ago for roughly a quarter of what they’re worth now, and for years it rewarded me with images that justified every compromise.

The Beginning of the End

As the Berlin sun disappeared, so too did my confidence in the camera’s future. The notorious weakness of the GA645Zi is its rear LCD panel, connected by a ribbon cable that flexes every time the camera is opened for loading film. Eventually that cable fails, and mine began displaying the first telltale flickers that countless owners before me had documented online.

The camera still functioned, so I loaded another roll and headed into the gathering darkness. Night photography with this Fuji was always going to be challenging. Ilford HP5 pushed to ISO 1600 has served me well in other cities, and I’ve even shot colour film after dark in places like Shinjuku and South Korean markets. Berlin, however, felt different. Empty squares, dim lighting and reflective surfaces made flash photography more frustrating than helpful, while my own developing mistakes probably didn’t do the negatives any favours.

Rather than fight the darkness, I eventually decided to embrace it. Cropping away unnecessary empty space and leaning into deep shadows produced images that felt more atmospheric than documentary. Streetlights reflecting from tram tracks, isolated figures disappearing into blackness and fragments of illuminated architecture became studies in mood rather than perfect technical photographs. Some images asked viewers to complete the story themselves, filling the darkness with their own interpretation.

Living with a Flawed Masterpiece

The GA645Zi wasn’t finished just yet. On a later trip through China, the LCD had deteriorated so badly that I could barely read it, but I managed to improvise. By comparing the camera’s exposure readings against a phone light meter, I convinced myself that as long as the ISO setting matched, perhaps the missing display wasn’t the end of the world.

After all, the qualities that make this camera special remained intact. The viewfinder still displays shutter speed and aperture information, which is essential given the relatively slow lens and the razor-thin depth of field that medium format provides. When the autofocus gets things right, the results are genuinely superb.

Unfortunately, “when” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The autofocus has always been somewhat optimistic about its own abilities, occasionally deciding that somewhere near your intended subject is close enough. The camera is also painfully slow. Switching it on feels remarkably similar to trying to wake a teenager for school. It pauses, contemplates life for a moment, and then reluctantly gets moving with as much complaining as possible.

That makes it a poor choice for decisive street photography, yet somehow it still produced some of my favourite travel images. Whether wandering through Vietnam, Japan, Barcelona or elsewhere, the combination of medium format resolution and an unobtrusive automatic camera often resulted in photographs that simply felt different. Massive negatives are arguably better suited to sweeping architecture, dramatic landscapes and iconic locations than everyday street scenes, but the GA645Zi always tempted me to use it for everything.

One of its final adventures took place in Shenzhen’s Overseas Chinese Town, where replicas of famous landmarks from around the world provided an appropriately surreal setting for a camera that itself seemed full of contradictions. A sophisticated medium format system disguised as a disposable point-and-shoot felt perfectly at home photographing imitation Venice inside one of the world’s youngest megacities.

Saying Goodbye

By the end of that trip, the LCD had finally died completely. Unfortunately, the problem turned out to be more serious than simply losing information on the display. Whatever electronics had failed also prevented the film from advancing correctly. Film would load, exposure compensation still functioned, but the camera simply refused to wind on. After years of faithful service, it had reached the end of the road.

Over the past decade this Fuji accompanied me across Europe and Asia. It documented family history, quiet personal moments and famous destinations alike. It visited places connected to my family’s experiences during the First World War, wandered through Aix-en-Provence, Kuala Lumpur, Japan and countless other cities, while also recording the ordinary family photographs that often become the most precious years later. Medium format has a wonderful way of preserving tiny details that you barely notice at the time but come to treasure with hindsight.

Looking back through its final rolls, there are still plenty of photographs worth celebrating. As always, they combine people, architecture and those odd little moments that somehow define travel better than famous landmarks ever could. The camera occasionally produced technical disasters alongside genuine gems, but perhaps that’s part of its charm.

I’ll genuinely miss the Fujifilm GA645Zi, although not enough to pay today’s inflated prices for another one. Losing it felt surprisingly similar to saying goodbye to an ageing pet: increasingly slow, occasionally unreliable and prone to little accidents, yet a loyal companion that had been there for some remarkable experiences.

Thankfully, medium format photography doesn’t end here. There are other cameras waiting for future adventures, including one substantially larger beast with enormous 6×9 negatives and, perhaps most importantly, absolutely no electronics waiting to self-destruct. It may make me look even more ridiculous carrying it through airports and city streets, but at least I won’t be worrying about ribbon cables every time I load a roll of film.