It’s telling that, nearly 20 years after production of the 35mm Hasselblad XPan film camera ended, Fujifilm’s exceptional GFX100RF fixed lens medium format digital camera pays homage with this panoramic 65:24 aspect ratio setting. The link, of course, is that the XPan was really a Fujifilm camera, the TX-1, and agreement was that this model would be sold only in Japan, leaving the Swedes with the rest of the world.
With its comparatively compact size and big “33x44” sensor, the GFX100RF has perhaps become the nearest thing to the ‘digital XPan’ that everybody was yearning for as 35mm film’s glory days became clearly numbered. The 65:24 aspect represents an imaging area 44x16 millimetres on the Fujifilm camera’s 102 megapixels sensor and a healthy 50 MP of resolution at the lens’s 28mm-equivalent focal length, but there’s also the option of applying further crops to give, effectively, 35mm, 50mm and 63mm. And even at the heaviest crop, the resolution is still a usable 10MP.
