The Fuji GX680 is a beast. It is the biggest, heaviest medium format camera I have ever owned, tipping the scales at over 4 kilos (more than 9 pounds) without a battery. It is also, when you get it working, capable of the sharpest and most detailed images I have ever pulled off a piece of film.
I paid £40 for mine. The reason it was £40, and the reason these cameras are generally dirt cheap, is a dead battery problem that turns most of them into very effective doorstops. The fix is simple DIY. This is the story of getting one working, plus a flash-and-smoke portrait shoot to show what the camera can actually do once it is running.
What it is
The GX680 is a medium format SLR designed for studio work. It shoots 6x8 frames (6cm x 8cm, which is what the “680” refers to), giving you 10 exposures per roll of 120. It has a rotating back like the Mamiya RB67, but being introduced in 1987 (versus the RB67’s 1970), it has 17 years more technology in it.
The variants:
- GX680 (Mark 1), introduced 1987
- GX680 II, introduced 1995
- GX680 III and IIIS, produced right up until 2010
That 2010 production date is genuinely remarkable. They were still making this medium format film camera well into the digital era. For reference, the groundbreaking Canon 5D Mark II came out in 2008. Fujifilm were still building the GX680 III two years after that, and Fuji do not have a reputation for keeping underperforming products on the market, so they must have still been selling well into 2008-2009. This may be the heaviest dedicated medium format camera ever made, and quite possibly one of the last commercially-produced medium format film cameras of its kind.
Mine is a Mark 1, which puts it somewhere between 29 and 37 years old. By the standards of the cameras I usually feature on the channel, that makes it a young whippersnapper.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Fuji GX680 in full, showing the sheer size of the thing next to a normal object for scale]
The technology, which is the point and the problem
The GX680 was conceived as the ultimate medium format camera of its era, and it is packed with technology that reflects that ambition:
- Electronic film advance with full communication between the back and the body in either orientation
- A rotating 6x8 back that talks to the camera electronically, so it remembers your frame count
- An internal light sensor allowing aperture-priority auto exposure (set the aperture, the camera works out the shutter speed)
- A leaf shutter in each lens, which means flash sync at any shutter speed (more on why that matters below)
- Extensive movements, because it is essentially a small view camera with bellows, allowing tilt and shift for focus-plane and perspective control
All of that 1980s electronics is the camera’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness. The weakness is the battery.
Why these cameras are so cheap
The GX680 Mark 1 and Mark 2 used a proprietary Fujifilm NiCd battery pack. Like every NiCd pack from the 1980s, they are all dead now, and they do not hold charge. Without a working battery, the GX680 does nothing at all. It is a fully electronic camera with no mechanical fallback.
So the majority of GX680 Mark 1s and 2s on the used market are non-functional, which means they sell for almost nothing. Mine cost £40 at auction, in essentially immaculate condition, with the only problem being the dead battery situation.
If you are willing to do a bit of DIY, that £40 immaculate camera becomes a fully working £40 immaculate camera. Here is how.
The fixes I did
Three jobs to get this camera running.
1. The film back battery. There is a second battery inside the film back, soldered onto a circuit board, that keeps power to the back so it remembers the frame count when removed from the camera. Mine was dead. I took the back apart and soldered in a replacement battery. (The specific replacement battery and a good tutorial are linked in the video description.)
2. The missing dark slide. The camera arrived without a dark slide. I made one, based on dimensions a kind person shared online. Not difficult.
3. The main battery, the big one. This is the real fix. There are instructions online for powering the GX680 with an AA battery pack, and I built one, but when I did the sums I was not confident the voltage worked out correctly.
So I did some research. The proprietary NiCd pack is 7.2 volts. That is exactly the voltage of a Sony NP-F battery, the ubiquitous camcorder/light/monitor battery that you can buy anywhere, cheaply, and that I already use to power some of my lights.
So I rigged up an NP-F adapter. I took an NP-F battery charger, took it apart, wired the positive and negative leads to some contacts, and 3D-printed a connector (the design is on Thingiverse, linked in the video description). The whole thing slots into the camera’s battery bay and accepts a standard NP-F battery.
My version is rough and messy, because it was the first time I built it. Now that I know it works, I could redo it much more tidily. But rough as it is, it works perfectly. The camera powers up, the film back works, the bellows are secure, everything functions as it should.
Total cost: about £140 including the camera, the batteries, and the bits for the adapter. For that, I have a fully working GX680 that takes some of the most detailed images I have ever produced.
![PLACEHOLDER: the NP-F battery adapter fitted to the camera, showing the bodged-but-functional power solution]
The shoot: Rob, flash, and smoke
The GX680 was designed as a studio camera, so I set up a shoot that played to its strengths rather than taking it for an aimless wander or, heaven forbid, trying to shoot street with a 4-kilo camera. I worked with Rob, a model I have photographed before, who is the undisputed king of texture: great beard, great clothes, a face and presence that reward a detailed camera.
The plan was to start simple and get progressively more ambitious. It started simple and ended with five flash guns, off-camera flash, and a collection of smoke grenades and smoke pellets. As these things do.
Natural light first. FP4 loaded, 150mm lens, starting with environmental portraits of Rob on a stile and working closer frame by frame to head-and-shoulders. The camera’s fastest shutter speed is 1/400th, which means shooting wide open in bright light is a struggle (you run out of shutter speed and overexpose), but the overcast day helped.
Flash to overpower the sky. Switched to flash, using the camera’s hot shoe (a genuine treat on a film camera) or the PC sync socket. The technique: light Rob with flash and use a fast-enough shutter speed to darken the sky behind him, so he comes out properly exposed against a moodier, darker sky than the eye sees. The leaf shutter is crucial here. Because the shutter is in the lens, it syncs with flash at any speed, so I could use a high shutter speed to kill the ambient sky while the flash handled Rob. With a focal-plane shutter you would be limited to a sync speed of maybe 1/60th or 1/125th, and you could not darken the sky this way.
Smoke and silhouettes. Inside, out of the rain, I started with smoke pellets and an unmodified flash gun directly behind Rob, to silhouette him and light up the smoke around him. Worked through coloured smoke (yellow, then blue), shooting Kentmere and then colour film, adjusting the lighting from pure silhouette to a mix of backlight and front fill.
Back outside for moody sky portraits. Finished with the flash-overpowering-sky technique again, this time more refined, getting the light to creep up under the brim of Rob’s hat for a dramatic dark-sky portrait.
![PLACEHOLDER: a flash-lit portrait of Rob against a darkened sky, showing the leaf-shutter flash-sync technique]
The image quality
This is where the GX680 stops being a novelty (a comically large camera) and becomes something special.
The image quality is, frankly, insane. By far the sharpest, most detailed images I have ever got from a medium format film camera. The 6x8 negative is large, the Fujinon lenses are superb, and the combination renders detail that genuinely exceeds what I can show you in a scan. The scans I made were limited by the megapixels of my scanning camera, not by what the GX680 captured on the negative. There is more detail on those negatives than I have been able to extract digitally.
I am genuinely excited to take the black and white negatives into the darkroom and make big optical prints, because that is where the full resolution of these negatives will show. A scan undersells them.
If you want the absolute maximum image quality from a medium format film camera, and you are willing to deal with the size and the battery situation, the GX680 delivers it.
The downsides, honestly
Setting aside the obvious (it is massive, it is heavy, the original batteries are dead), the real downsides are few.
It is very like shooting digital. The electronic everything, the aperture priority, the metered operation, all of it makes the GX680 feel more like a digital workflow than a traditional mechanical film camera. Whether that is a downside depends on what you want from film. For me it is a slight loss of the tactile mechanical experience, but the results more than compensate.
The size and weight genuinely limit where you can use it. This is a tripod-or-studio camera. The Mark 1 and 2 do not even have strap lugs (the Mark 3 added them). You can hand-hold it (it is only 4 kilos) but you would want an eye-level finder to do so, and it would be hard work. This is not a camera you take on holiday for snapshots.
The dead-battery situation is a barrier to entry, though as I have shown, a surmountable one.
The verdict, and my dilemma
The Fuji GX680 is an incredible camera. Not just for the price (under £200 for a working example, or £40 plus DIY for a project), but in absolute terms. The image quality is extraordinary. The build quality is superb. It was designed to be the ultimate medium format camera of its era and it largely succeeded, which is why Fuji kept making it until 2010.
I am left with a real dilemma. I want to keep it, because it is fantastic and produces images I cannot get from anything else. But it is enormous, it takes up an extraordinary amount of space, and I have to be honest about how often I will actually use a 4-kilo studio camera. For now, I think I am going to leave it on the shelf and let it stare at me for a while. I cannot bring myself to let it go.
There is a broader thing this camera has done for me, which is worth mentioning. Before I went down the analogue road I shot a lot of commercial digital work with flash, every day. When I moved to film I had some bad experiences trying to use off-camera flash the way I used to, got poor results, and realised how much I had been relying on fixing exposure in post rather than getting it right in camera. So I quietly dropped flash.
This shoot with Rob proved to me that I can make flash work on film. The results are exactly what I wanted. So you may well see a lot more off-camera flash on the channel from here, and the GX680 is the camera that reminded me I could do it.
Should you buy one
If you want the maximum image quality a medium format film camera can give you, and you have a studio or a tripod-based practice where the size is not a dealbreaker, the GX680 is an astonishing bargain. Under £200 for a working example, or £40 and an afternoon of DIY for a project camera.
If you want something portable, this is emphatically not it. Buy a folder, a TLR, or a 645 SLR.
If you are nervous about the battery DIY, look for a Mark 3 (which used a different battery and is more likely to have a working power solution) or buy one already converted. But the conversion is genuinely simple. If I can do it with my limited electronics skills (wire one thing to another, add a bit of glue), most people can.
Big thanks to Rob for the shoot. He is the king of texture and he is available for bookings on PurplePort, linked in the video description. And big thanks to whoever it was that designed the GX680 in the mid-1980s, because it is still, four decades later, one of the most impressive cameras I have ever used.