Manual Focusing Fuji GA 645 zi

I'm looking for a light weight range finder that I can use when I go backpacking. I'm looking at the Fuji GA 645 zi and have heard great things about it's sharpness. My one concern is manually focusing this camera. I shoot nature and landscapes and prefer to manually focus the lens. How easy is this to do with this camera?

hsakols said:

I'm looking for a light weight range finder that I can use when I go backpacking. I'm looking at the Fuji GA 645 zi and have heard great things about it's sharpness. My one concern is manually focusing this camera. I shoot nature and landscapes and prefer to manually focus the lens. How easy is this to do with this camera?

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The Fuji GA645 Zi is a very nice camera with an accurate automatic exposing and focusing system. The variable focus lens is very sharp, and though it does not cover a wide range (55-90mm, about like a 35-70mm on 35mm), it makes the camera much more versatile IMO than the other fixed focus Fuji rangefinders. However, the manual focusing mode is not very sophisticated in that the only option is to set focus to a specific distance by rotating a knob. And, there is no depth of field scale on the lens. I don't use this feature very much since I find it much more convenient to just focus on the desired area of the scene, lock the focus, and then re-compose the scene. There is a read out of focus distance in the viewfinder so you can use this to verify that you have focused on the area you want.

Sandy

Agreed - great camera (My wife has one, plus a G645w and my borther has a zi too), but manual focus is a non starter.

It requires some fiddly button pushing, and guessing the distance. There's NO way to tell whats in focus (it's not strictly a rangefinder in the tradititional sense), other than reading back the distance - fine for checking the auto is doing it's job, but not for setting focus. It's really not worth it.

Either accept the auto-focus or go with one of the older models which are real range finders.

Ian