Fuji GA645Zi – Mark McMahon

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.

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.

Mark McMahon

Tag: Fuji GA645Zi

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