This camera has a nickname. Everyone uses it. Type the model number into any forum or blog and within two sentences someone will have said the words. I am not going to. There is already a sufficient quantity of writing about this camera that uses the nickname and I see no need to add to the pile. If you do not know the nickname, you will have to look it up. If you do know the nickname, you will know I am being deliberately childish about this and you can carry on quietly.
What you need to know about the camera is in the nickname anyway, just without the actual words. It is a Fuji rangefinder. It looks like a famous European rangefinder if that famous European rangefinder had been made roughly ten times bigger. The lens is excellent. The negatives are huge. That is the whole nickname, dressed up in different language.
The model is the Fuji GW690iii and I have brought one to Alaska for a month, which is where I have spent the last three days finding out whether I like it.
Why this camera, why now
I am in Alaska for work, as I usually am when I am away from home for any length of time. I had to pick one camera to bring, knowing I would be here long enough to actually use it. The Bronica S2A is the obvious answer for me, but the S2A is heavy and big and was throwing focus problems just before I left, which means I would have arrived in Anchorage with a camera I could not fully trust. There is a chunk of out-of-focus negatives from a 510 Pyro test shoot the week before that confirmed it.
So I sat down with the cameras I could realistically take and made a different decision. The GW690iii is lighter than the S2A. It shoots 6x9, which suits the kind of wide landscape shots that Alaska is going to offer. It is fully mechanical, which means no batteries to worry about and no electronics to fail in the cold. And it has a reputation for sharp negatives and a sharp lens, which I had been curious about for years without ever actually committing to one.
Weight was the deciding factor. I had to fly with this camera. A month away from home means the suitcase is mostly socks and underwear. The S2A would have eaten more of the bag than was reasonable. The Fuji is lighter, especially considering the format size, and that won the toss.
What the GW690iii actually is
Fuji released the GW690iii in February 1992, the third generation of a fixed-lens 6x9 rangefinder line that ran from 1978 until around 2003. The story of the line goes further back than that. The original Fujica G690 launched in 1967 with interchangeable lenses. It evolved through the GL690 and the GM670 over the next decade. Then in 1978 the line was simplified into the fixed-lens form that became the GW690, with a wide-angle GSW690 alongside it for photographers who wanted something truly wide.
The GW line then ran for three generations of body design. The original 1978 GW690 carried the Fujica brand. It had a cold shoe and no strap lugs at the top of the body. The shutter and odometer mechanism were a bit loud, which some users complained about. The 1985 GW690II rebranded as Fuji. It picked up a hot shoe and two sets of strap lugs, and had its mechanisms quieted down. The 1992 GW690III was a full body redesign in plastic, lighter than its predecessors and arguably more comfortable in the hand.
Each generation also spawned matching variants in other formats. The GW670 series did 6x7 on the same body. The GW680 added a 6x8 option. And the wide-angle GSW690 ran alongside the regular 690 with its 65mm f/5.6 lens.
Production ended around 2003, by which point digital was eating film professionally and even Fuji had no commercial reason to keep the tooling running for a niche rangefinder.
People will tell you the plastic body of the III is a step down from the metal of the II. In the hand, mine does not feel cheap. Sturdy enough that I was happy to put it in a checked bag for an eight-hour flight. Light enough that I was happy to be carrying it in the first place.
The fixed lens is a 90mm f/3.5 EBC Fujinon. EBC means Electron Beam Coating, which is Fuji’s name for their good multi-coating from the period. The lens is sharp. People who own one will tell you the lens is the reason to own one. I have shot two rolls and I am inclined to agree.
The viewfinder is a coupled rangefinder with a focus patch in the middle. You line up the two images, you are in focus. There is no live view of what the lens is seeing, in the same way that a film Leica has no live view. The viewfinder shows you the frame and the focus patch and that is all.
Controls are all on the lens itself. Aperture in yellow on the bottom ring. Shutter speed in white on the top ring. Focus on the wide knurled middle ring. To get at any of them, you pull the built-in lens hood forward, which uncovers the rings underneath. With the hood pushed back in place, the rings are hidden and the camera looks like a much simpler object than it actually is. This is a clever piece of design, except for one consequence I will come back to.
There is no light meter. There is no battery. The shutter is a leaf shutter in the lens, which gives you sync at every speed up to its maximum of 1/500. Shutter speeds run from 1 second to 1/500 plus T for long exposures. There is no B. The film advance is a two-stroke lever, which is a fractionally fussier action than a single stroke but you stop noticing it after a roll.
The format is 6x9 cm, eight frames per roll of 120. The 90mm focal length on a 6x9 negative works out at roughly a 38mm equivalent in 35mm terms. Bit wider than a 50mm normal lens, bit narrower than a classic 35mm. For landscape work, this is a useful focal length, wide without being so wide that you have to fight perspective.
The GSW versions, the wide-angle 65mm cousins, get called by a related but more parochial nickname which I am also refusing to use. I will end up getting one of them a few years later, and that is a different piece.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Fuji GW690iii with the lens hood pulled forward, exposing the aperture and shutter rings]
First outing: Glen Alps, Chugach State Park
I drove about twenty-five minutes out of Anchorage to the Glen Alps trailhead in Chugach State Park. After paying the parking fee, I walked five minutes from the car to where the snow opened out into a wide bowl with mountain peaks rising in the distance. There was a path through the snow that someone had broken before me. The light was harsh and clean and there was almost no colour anywhere, which is the kind of scene black and white film does well.
I had a roll of FP4 loaded. I also had a roll of Ektar in my pocket for when the colour caught my eye, which it did a few frames in.
Exposure was straightforward. I used a Reveni Labs Spot Meter, which is the tiny new spot meter from Matt Bechberger in Canada. It is about the size of a thumb and fits in my pocket alongside the film. Set the ISO, point at the scene, read the EV, dial in the aperture and shutter speed on the lens. The reading on FP4 in the open snow was something like 1/60 at f/22 to give me a decent negative and a decent depth of field for the landscape frames. Black and white film and bright snow get on extremely well.
The composition on a 6x9 frame takes a bit of getting used to. The aspect ratio is wider than 6x7 and considerably wider than 6x6, which is what I am used to from the Bronica. The viewfinder frame shows you that wider shape and your eye has to get used to using all of it. A few of my early frames were composed for a 6x6 mental shape and came out with too much sky on top because of it.
I cannot remember the last time I felt this unselective. Newbie excitement, in honest words. Everything looked good. Every direction I pointed the camera, the scene composed itself and I wanted to expose for it. I started to worry I was just going to bring back eight identical landscape frames of distant mountains, so I deliberately turned around and pointed the camera at things that were not pretty mountains. Power lines. The path. A car park. Doing this disciplined me a little and the negatives are better for it.
![PLACEHOLDER: an FP4 frame from the first outing, snow and distant mountains]
![PLACEHOLDER: an Ektar frame from the same shoot]
A note on filters
There is one design decision on the GW690iii that does not work, and it is the one I want to flag honestly. The lens accepts 67mm screw-in filters. The filter thread is on the inside ring of the lens. Getting to it requires you to slide the built-in lens hood back, screw in the filter, then push the hood forward again. But the hood, when pushed forward, is also the thing that covers the aperture and shutter speed rings. So the workflow if you want to use a yellow or red filter on FP4 in snow becomes:
Pull the hood forward to set your exposure, push the hood back to access the filter thread, screw in the filter, pull the hood forward again to shoot. Then for the next frame, if anything has changed, pull the hood forward to read your meter again, push it back, unscrew the filter or change it, pull the hood forward, push it back, screw the new filter on, pull the hood forward to shoot.
I gave up. I shot the snow without a red filter, which would have darkened the sky and brought the clouds out more dramatically, because the workflow was annoying enough that I lost interest in it. Slip-on filters might be the answer if you can find a set in 67mm slip-on equivalents, but I did not have any with me. Push-on holders might work too. As shipped, with screw-in filters, this is a camera that does not really want you to use filters.
This is the kind of thing that becomes obvious only when you actually try to shoot the camera in conditions where a filter would help. Fuji released this camera as a professional landscape and travel tool. Professional landscape photographers use filters. I cannot tell whether Fuji’s intended user was supposed to know something I am missing, or whether this is just a design corner that nobody at Fuji actually shot themselves into.
What I think of it after three rolls
Honestly? I am impressed. Sharp lens, sharp negatives, lovely tonal range from FP4 in good light, punchy colour from Ektar. The 6x9 frame is enormous and gives you all the detail you could want. The camera is light enough that I did not regret carrying it. The mechanics are clean and direct. The leaf shutter is quiet, which some people will tell you matters and which I would say is fine but is not a feature I will be writing home about.
The one thing I keep coming back to is whether the camera has character. I have written before about cameras like the Mamiya C330, where the build is good and the results are excellent but the camera has a kind of modern, well-engineered, slightly anodyne quality. The GW690iii is in the same family. It produces lovely images. It does it without much drama. There is no satisfying mirror slap. There is no soft visual signature that says “this came off a particular lens.” It just makes properly exposed sharp negatives with good tonal range.
I have, until recently, treated this as a problem. A camera that just works, with no personality, has never been quite my thing. But the S2A focus problems are wearing on me. There is a part of me, an increasingly large part, that is starting to think a camera that just works might be exactly what I need. Maybe the lack of character is the feature. Maybe I have been wrong about that for years.
I do not know yet. I am in Alaska for another three weeks and I have only this camera with me, which means we are going to find out together.
What’s next
This is Part 1 of what will be at least two pieces from the GW690iii in Alaska. The first outing was the mountains and the snow, the easy beautiful thing. For Part 2 I am going to take the camera into downtown Anchorage and find something less postcard. I am better with grubbier scenes than I am with mountains, and I want to see how the Fuji handles a city. Part 2 is here when you are ready.
If you know the nickname and you are itching to type it into the comments, please resist. I have made it three thousand miles from home and two thousand words into this article without using it, and I would like the streak to hold.