The Fuji GA645Zi is my favourite and least liked camera. I call him Harvey after Harvey Weinstein. Big, ugly and powerful, promising you the world but more likely to leave you traumatised with your creative ambitions in tatters. This article will explain why.

You have to hand it to Fujifilm for bucking trends. Throughout the last decades of the film era, while Canon and Nikon were squeezing the last juice out of the 35mm SLR industry, companies like Fuji and Mamiya knew that the value of film lay in the quality and dynamic range of the medium and continued to innovate with larger format offerings that gave great quality while minimising the size. These days everyone lusts after the Mamiya 7 series of medium format rangefinders and this little device is a little neglected but in the 90s Fujifilm had a complete range of medium format cameras.

It’s 90s pedigree is unmistakable. Think boy bands, roller blading and the Rachel haircut. The same design sensibility carries through with its ‘champagne’ coloured plastic. You saw it on your Dad’s Honda Accord and you see it here… sleek and spangly, promising opulance like a knock off burberry handbag.

In the end, this is never going to win a camera beauty contest in the same way that a sumo wrestler isn’t going to be crowned Miss Universe. Its size alone makes this look gauche and clumsy. But as I keep protesting, looks aren’t everything. How does it perform?

Roll One

For the first roll, I shot Ilford Pan F Plus 50, which is a wonderful sharp film but in the dark wintry streets of Nakameguro perhaps was not the best idea.

You can probably tell that it has a sharp lens. With ten elements in ten groups, it has quite a complex design but with two limitations. Firstly, it’s has a measly 1.6x zoom range of 55-90mm. That makes it equivalent to 34-56mm in 35mm terms or ‘not very wide to not very long’ in human vernacular, and it moves in four steps rather than allowing you to zoom seamlessly.

Secondly, it struggles with a slow maximum aperture of F/4.5-6.9 through the zoom range. So Ilford Pan F 50 is probably not the best choice. Ultimately, it’s a point and shoot with all of the trade-offs that come with it.

It takes a while to start up and is not particularly responsive. It certainly gives you more control than a regular point and shoot, though, having two aperture priority modes, with the AS maintaining normal metered exposure so you can use flash for fill light rather than as a replacement for light. You can also shoot manual with it, though that’s an awkward process and I tend not to. Most of the time I leave it on Program mode, which is basically automatic but with the advantage of still requiring you to manually pop-up the flash. That works for me because of my biggest frustrations of most 35mm point-and-shoots is their tendency to default to autoflash when you turn them on.

It has autofocus too, obviously, and for the most part it works well. Again, it’s just like a regular point-and-shoot, where you focus on the centre of the frame with a half press and then recompose before releasing the shutter. It’s not fool proof, at least not for a fool like me. It misses focus occasionally. It does have one great feature, though, in that it let’s you know the general distance in the viewfinder before you take the shot. That gives you the chance to check beforehand and the fact that I find myself looking at it most of the time is probably a good indication that you need to be careful. It is still a step up from a regular point and shoot where you never know how it’s going to come out. It can also manually focus, which is kind of pointless here, since there’s no feedback to tell you whether you’re subject is sharp or not. You have to guess the distance and it’s so slow as not be not worth it most of the time. The only time I really see myself using this is if I want to shoot a set distance and I can’t move the camera because it’s on a tripod, or if I have to focus on infinity through glass and am worried about reflections tricking the focus.

So it is an awkward creature in many respects. Both frustratingly automatic and irritatingly quirky. Being a viewfinder camera, I have shot more than a few frames with the lens cap on. It actually does have a lens cap sensor that you can turn on that I didn’t even know that until I started to digging through the manual for the camera specs  for this video. You have to push up the zoom lever and turn the camera mode dial to the ISO setting. Not very intuitive. You can also turn the beep on by using the ISO setting with self timer but I just leave it off . And I promise you, I’ll completely forget how to change these settings after having published this.

Another quirky feature of this camera is the vertical viewfinder. Being 6×4.5, it’s pretty much a half frame camera, fitting two portrait images in a 6×9 frame. The best thing about this design, honestly, is the grip and the shutter button. The camera feels good in your hand, despite its size and I found my finger naturally fell on the button, even if I had to rotate it to do a normal landscape photo.

And you can use this camera quite well one-handed but it is fiddly. I did drop this in the centre of Shibuya several years ago but that was more because I was relying on a generic wrist strap purchased on ebay that broke on me than a problem with the grip. It survived well but learn from my mistakes here, kids, do not attach a flimsy Aliexpress wrist strap to your Leica M11.

So Harvey is something of a clumsy leviathan of a point and shoot and that’s not something you typically want with you when you’re out on the street. In dim light with slow film you’re battling with the exposure triangle, particularly  at the modest 55mm equivalent long end with its f/6.9 maximum aperture.

But what if we change film and actually give it a fighting chance? Can I do proper street photography with it?

Roll Two

The second roll was more successful and no prizes for guessing that HP5 at 1600 is my preferred combination for this kind of photography. Being medium format, even when pushed two stops, the grain is small and refined and black and white streets lend themselves to a bit of grit anyway.

There are those that would argue that 6×4.5 isn’t true medium format. But a 6×4.5 is still 2.6 times the frame size of 35mm so that’s more than two and a half times the megapixels in today’s currency.

You still have room to crop but I find I’m less likely to do that than with my square frame medium format cameras. Here you have a 4×3 ratio that is exactly the same as my micro four thirds camera, and much more flexible than a square format. If you crop a 6×6 frame for horizontal or portrait orientation you lose the benefits of the larger real estate anyway. You could certainly go bigger but if you were 6×9 you’d need a bigger camera with a bigger lens and you would only get 8 frames. I do have a 6×9 camera but don’t use it as often just because of cost of consumables. Film has gone up in price and while we all have to make sacrifices to fund our hobbies my wife told me that apparently my kids still need at least one functioning kidney each to survive.

So this can be more economical on film but you do miss out on a little bit on that medium format ‘look’, where even with a moderate aperture and focal length you can throw out the background to get that soft blur and 3d pop. The out-of-focus areas are actually quite dreamy with this lens but with all of the compromises of the smaller frame and slow lens, combined with the focusing distance of 1m, you are limited to shooting people no closer than waist high, which doesn’t often make for a dramatic portrait, even though it could be a great tool for corporate head shots.

But if you want a studio camera, get a Hasselblad or Mamiya RZ. This a point and shoot. A point and shoot with one huge difference. It’s sharp. The lens resolves detail with surgical precision that can beat any 35mm camera and lens combination. With this in your hand, you’re really carrying with an analogue powerhouse.

Roll Three

I was not done yet. I had one final roll of film to go. Now for some Tokyo night photography, this time using Kodak Portra 800 Colour Negative film.

I was surprised how well I was able to shoot at night. I love 800 speed colour film, though most of the time, its cost puts me off using it. Perhaps it would not have fared so well in the darker corners of Tokyo but in the bright lights of Shinjuku, I was still able to do hand-held street photography quite comfortably.

Recommendations

As I said, at the beginning, I am ambivalent about this camera. I find the shooting experience to be the same as shooting with a regular point-and-shoot. The small viewfinder, slow response, lack of feedback and overall plasticky feel of the camera body gives me a sense of remoteness from the experience and to use a well worn cliché using it doesn’t ‘spark joy’ the way some of my other old cameras do.

And yet, I find myself using it more than any other medium format camera I own. While not exactly pocketable, it is compact, convenient, and once you get to know its quirks, using it as an auto-everything photo maker can be quite liberating. This has been with me around the world since I first got it in 2015 and I’ve taken some great shots with it.  The good thing about it being so ugly is I never feel that I’m going to get mugged while I carry it through some of the sketchier parts of town. Straight after the safe streets of Tokyo, I took it through the chaos of the Pettah region of Colombo and it drew only the occasional glance of confusion or mild disdain. And I’m used to that.

That doesn’t mean I’m relaxed about Harvey, though. Everything’s electronic and I suspect I’m living on borrowed time. Like a lot of automatic zoom cameras of the era, many of the parts are fragile and there are lots of stories about ribbon circuits in particular flexing and breaking after long-term use. That will kill the zoom mechanism eventually and one of the known problems with this is the cable that connects through the back of the camera to the LCD makes it difficult to read the frame counter when it wears out.

The fact that there you can buy new generic replacement ribbon cable parts for this camera is probably the best indication that it’s a ticking time bomb. Even if you can source the parts, though you will have a hard time getting it fixed. I bought this camera for AU$650 eight years ago but now the price has jumped up so much that I’d hesitate to replace it if it broke.

Would I recommend it to others? In some situations, yes, and in others no. As I wrote, I’m ambivalent. And you know the old joke about ambivalence. What’s the difference between ignorance, apathy, and ambivalence? I don’t know and I don’t care one way or the other.

That’s not true about this camera. Whether I’d suggest this camera to others, is not a straight yes or no. This is a camera that has some limitations and requires you to get to know it to use it properly. But once you do you can be stunned by the results and it inspires anything other than apathy. Just carrying it labels you as a 90s icon, it’s champagne accents perfectly complementing the frosted tips of your bleached blond hair as you cut a swathe through the crowd at that Fresh Prince concert to capture those classic hip hop poses on celluloid.

I know that I for one can’t help but get a little bit jiggy with it when I try to squeeze it into the pockets of my cargo pants while I’m out on the streets of Tokyo.