In the world of medium format cameras Fujifilm GFX 100 is certainly one of the most prominent products, with outstanding performance, in terms – of course – of resolution, but also of operational speed, focus and flexibility of use.

Now Fujifilm adds a new arrow to the GFX quiver 100, enabling the functionality ?? Pixel Shift Multi-Shot ?? to capture images at 400 megapixels , promised at the beginning of ‘year. Not only that, the mode is based on well 16 shots and not only ‘multiplies’ the pixels, but for each one it gets the color information on each chromatic component.

As the name makes clear, the mode uses the IBIS internal stabilization mechanism to move the sensor precisely and sample the image with multiple shots. Fujifilm has released details on how multi-shot mode works, which uses two types of shift for sampling.

Pixel Shift Multi-Shot: 16 shots and 400 megapixels without demosaicing

In the first cycle of 4 shots the sensor is moved by one pixel , so that each pixel is exposed to the 4 pieces of the Bayer matrix and the color information of all the components is stored in each point chromatic, unlike normal shots, where the demosaicing algorithm reconstructs the missing components based on the adjacent pixels.

In the other 3 cycles of 4 shots, the sensor is initially moved by half a pixel (twice on the horizontal axis and once on the vertical axis) before carrying out the sampling with a whole pixel, which therefore in these 3 cycles of 4 shots is found reads the information of the intersections between the pieces of the Bayer matrix.

In summary, the Fujifilm mode manages to ‘save goat and cabbage’ by not asking to choose between the increase in resolution and the sampling of all the chromatic components on every single pixel, as it happens in some competing systems. The result are megapixel 400 images in which each point of the image the sensor has sampled all the color components .

The camera needs to be updated to access the function to firmware 3. 00 and download the Pixel Shift Combiner software. Multi-Shot shooting mode is available both when shooting tethered using the software and when shooting from the camera and then importing the images into the software later. In this second case the software automatically recognizes the 16 images to be selected for the creation of the final file. The software returns a megapixel 400 RAW file with the extension .DNG, to be developed with Capture One (or Photoshop and Lightroom) to create, for example , the TIFF version or in other universal formats. The software takes about a couple of minutes to process the 16 shots and the final result is a .DNG file of about 1.5 GB .