Motivation, introduction and issue with this camera

Got a camera in parts condition that refused to display anything except top screen information. It came without some screws missing and with no battery unit. Only one action resulted : don’t turn it on, take it apart! There are few other teardowns such as here by Kolari Vision or one from Lensrentals.com.

There is also teardown of smaller GFX50S from Kolari Vision here. Some internal bits also revealed in news while ago.

But none of those publications have juicy high resolution detailed images of the camera guts, so let’s fix that here. Each image is clickable for full size JPEG download to enjoy the glorious GFX 100 design in every detail. This will be partial teardown as there are still hopes to bring this camera back to life instead of going into hazmat landfill.

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Teardown and internal design

I like the exterior design of the camera. No big bold flashy labels or other markering non-sense, after all expensive digital medium format camera is not about wearing it as a jewelry but a professional tool to pay the bills and keep lights on.

After removing some bolts we can carefully detach the rear section with LCD and controls. There are two flex boards connecting it to the mainboard. Fuji left a lot of slack so it’s easy to access them and disconnect from latched connectors. Everything neatly packaged into clean assembly. Cover is made out of metal magnesium alloy.

Now we get access to the guts with nice look on mainboard and lot of interconnects. Bottom tripod mount had rectangular cover plate, now removed before the next image. We can also spot the holes for internal microphone. Not sure I like mic position on the bottom of the camera as it is the surface most often abused mechanically by placing camera on various uneven surfaces, especially with nature photography in the field low to the ground.

On top we have the large e-paper display, hot-shoe mount for flash combined with removable EVF interface. There is no PASM dial, instead we got selector for single stills, multi-shot modes and video movie mode. Dial is protected against accidental rotation by a “DRIVE” button.

Left side provide us with microphone/headphone jacks (on the rear removed panel), USB Type-C with PD support, micro-HDMI and most welcome 15V DC barrel jack (center positive) for studio setting. Fujifilm GFX100 supports tethering and full control of the camera from the PC. This side also has loading bay for battery tray that holds two Fuji NP-T125 lithium batteries to power this hungry beast of a camera.

On the right we get two full-size SDXC memory card slots and remote jack.

No battery could be visible from these angles yet. Let’s take the mainboard out. It is mounted to the chassis with six small screws. One screw is hidden under the top control panels unit.

To remove the top controls unit remove the screws under the rubber grips and one screw deep in the body, right under the EVF port.

Now we can get the mainboard out. Holy batman there are lot of DC-DC converters on this mainboard. They are everywhere on both sides of the board. Main processor is hiding under the DRAM package mounted on top of it. DRAM is made by Micron, P/N MT53D1024M64D8PM-053 WT:D which is already obsolete 64Gbit (8GByte, 1.866 GHz) 376 Ball, x64, Z11M Embedded LPDDR4/LPDDR4X SDRAM chip.

PCB looks nice a clean with copper plating over the microvias. PCB is quite thin, about 1mm. Wire positions nicely marked with color codes so it is easier to assembly it in the body without messing up the connections. Most of the connectors are unique as well, reducing the risk of improper wiring. Connectors like these often have limited lifetime and some of them, such as highspeed 40-pin Panasonic Y4BH used for FPC to the sensor assembly are already long obsoleted in 2021.

And bingo, we can spot a battery at the back of it, in the top left corner near the SD card slot. :)

I’ve also spent some time to figure out what are the key components around. Some of the chips are impossible to identify as they are too small to have full marking or proprietary ASICs. Micron chip with marking RW265 is MT35XU01GBBA1G12-0SIT NOR Flash 1Gbit memory chip where firmware of this camera lives.

There are also two specialized Toshiba TMPM343F10XBG microcontrollers, probably used for IBIS or mechanical drives controls. These ARM® Cortex™-M3 MCUs in VFBGA162 equipped with 1MByte of own Flash memory, 64KB SRAM, I^2^C and SPI masters and 4 programmable servo/sequence controllers with 8 motor drivers. Their estimated pricing is about 10 USD each. There microcontrollers are not well known on the market and there is no much information about them, no datasheet or even pinout available publicly. There is a databrief about similar TMPM342FYXBG in different VFBGA142 package.

But main thing we came here for – SEIKO EPSON tiny 3 mAh 3V lithium coin cell battery, part number MS414GE. This battery dies – camera will forget the RTC and some of the settings and will ask you to configure it every time you remove the main battery pack.

Should be trivial to replace it with something suitable. I’ll put larger MS518SE-FL35E battery instead, as there is space around the area. I’m pretty sure other GFX cameras also use same design.

This mainboard is HDI type with blind plated over microvias, so we cannot see much of the intricate details in optical images. Need to have more energetic imaging to see deeper:

Sadly I can’t get more details since inspection imager is pretty old and cannot get larger magnification ratios without making everything very blurry and pointless.

Camera body also reveals pretty cool view on IBIS system and floating suspended sensor assembly.

Sensor assembly frame is suspended with springs and held between strong rare-earth metal magnets on the chassis. Coils on the sensor assembly frame allow the camera to move the whole unit in multiple axis to cancel out small vibration and movements when camera is handheld. Sensor itself is SONY IMX495AQR which is likely a Fujifilm-customized derivative of standard SONY IMX461AQR with PDAF. Sadly I couldn’t find any mention of this sensor model elsewhere online.

Older GFX 50 body used SONY IMX161 without PDAF. Fujifilm is not the only one to use such sensor, there are other products on the market such as Hasselblad X2D or scientific camera QHYCCD QHY461PH using these sensors as well.

Fuji implements this IBIS technology in the newer GFX bodies as well, including much smaller GFX 100s and 50S II. Current flagship GFX 100 II further improve IBIS to very impressive up to 8 stops capability.

This action is best shown on video:

Time to dive deeper

GFX 100 sensor assembly teardown

To my surprise sensor marking on the back of the ceramic package reveals IMX495AQR partnumber. I was pretty sure to expect standard Sony IMX461AQR in there, but no, seems like Fujifilm ordered some custom version of IMX461 which got own part-number in Sony lineup.