REVIEW: Fujifilm GFX100s II with GF 45-100mm f/4 R LM OIS WR. Medium Format with No Limits–WOW!

Fujifilm GFX 100s II with 45-100mm f/4 lens

When I reviewed the Fujifilm GFX 50s with the 32-64mm in 2019, I was impressed with the amazing image quality, but It felt a bit useless as anything but a landscape or studio camera. Sure the image quality was great, but where things were with image processing and noise reduction back then, it just was a very limited use camera with a huge price. Fast forward to 2024, and the GFX 100s II addresses all those concerns even with twice the pixels.

FUJIFILM GF 45-100mm f/4 R LM OIS WR Lens

Over the past few months I’ve had the luxury of putting this camera through its paces using the GF 45-100mm f/4 R LM OIS WR Lens and I’m pleased to say that all my past complaints have been addressed. What we have now is a camera that is usable as handheld camera for everyday use, studio, landscape and sports in good lighting conditions.

Overall I found the user controls to be excellent from the ease of use of the touch screen, to the well designed Q menu, to the great traction of the joystick, everything is there when I need it without any hassle. \ What’s more, features like object (including pets), people and eye detection (including options for right and left eye only) make it easy to get a sharp focused shot without much challenge on your part.

One feature I didn’t play with too much because the default was good were the metering modes. Part of that was because I forgot that Fujifilm hides the metering options under the Photometry setting of the Shooting Settings, but it’s easy enough to assign that feature to one of the function buttons.That said, I only had two situations during the entire time I reviewed this camera whereby the default metering wasn’t spot on.

Here’s a video that does a deeper dive into the features of this camera along with some of my thoughts:

Now a 102MP camera creates amazing image files, but it comes with some pain as well. For starters, my RAF (raw) files were typically around 62 to 104MB and my HIF (HEIF) files could be as little as 4MB, but more frequently from 12 to 34MB on average. Toss one of the files (in any format) into Photoshop, and within a few layers you easily get 1 to 2GB files. As a result, after you’ve broke the bank to buy this camera and a lens, you better plan to upgrade your Synology NAS because you are going to need a ton of high speed disk storage! With that disclaimer out of the way, you’ll be rewarded with a lot of data to work with to create amazing images. Here’s one of the first shots I did in a makeshift studio in my garage using just a couple lights:

f/13 @ 100mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 200

You quickly realize that it’s easy to recover from just about any lighting mistake you made as the dynamic range is so wide. Here’s a link to the in-camera HIF file converted to JPEG of the above photo. It was easy to cover up some of my mistakes and edit a file that captured my intent perfectly.

Real World Shots

This was literally the first photo I took with this camera, so I was pretty excited right from the start. While this review will not feature many of the photos I took, here’s a look at some unedited images I took during my time reviewing this camera. In a few cases I show a cropped version, but link to the unedited original. However, all of these photos are HIF converted to JPEG versions of the in-camera original using Lightroom classic version 14.

All of my photos shown in this article are for your personal viewing. You may not print, edit, reuse or otherwise share any of these photos without my written consent. I retain copyright ownership and all rights are reserved.

For this photo, I used a Manfrotto (formerly Lastolite) 6x7'  Illuminated Background along with a Elinchrom Rotalux Deep Octabox (100cm / 39") and a Elinchrom Rotalux Deep Octabox (100cm / 39") to capture a pretty solid in-camera image (although the one shown here is cropped, but you can click to see the original):

f/13 @ 62mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 125

The detail in the fabric, hair, and embroidery are amazing. What’s more, nothing is blown out.  This image had a lot more to work with than the predecessor I had done years back with the GFX 50s.

This next photo represents a lot of what I love about this camera. In this case, I was taking photos elsewhere when I heard a ruckus in the water. I never noticed this guy, but he was winding down for the day. Without the ability to get close enough, I just took the shot knowing that with 102mp I could just crop and still have enough pixels for a reasonable photo. Click the image to see the full uncropped version:

f/5.6 @ 100mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 40

An added bonus of taking this shot was discovering the shadow details – this is the in-camera original with only a crop, yet I can clearly make out details on the face and in the body. What’s more, the sunset sky offers an amazing background as does the faint view of the mountains – captured identical to the naked eye at that moment in time.

Here’s a better view of that sunset and the mountains, off to the right, are a bit easier to see in this one:

f/32 @ 100mm for 1/6 sec at ISO 80

Again, I was impressed with the dynamic range of this sensor – wow! Then again, taking photos of sunsets kind of became addicting with this camera.

Here’s actually the first sunset I took with this camera from a house on the Puget Sound coast in Seattle when I was supposed to taking pictures of something else (hence the odd camera settings):     

f/5.6 @ 45mm for 1/1000 sec at ISO 160

Again, zero edits – just point and click at f/5.6! If you live in Scottsdale, Arizona, this camera is a must for those amazing sunsets! And just because they are so fun to photograph, here’s another one:

Now let’s take a break from landscapes for a bit, and get to one of the surprises I discovered with this camera during the early days of my review. For kicks and giggles I decided to shoot a football game with it just to see if it was up to the task, and it did much better than I expected. Here’s a shot that is really zoomed in for the crop, but you can click it to see the original image:

f/7.1 @ 90mm for 1/800 sec at ISO 200

Even though 90mm wasn’t enough to get me right there in the action, I could toss a ton of pixels and still get a shot with plenty of pixels of the play. Here’s another play:

f/4 @ 100mm for 1/800 sec at ISO 80

It had been a while since I shot football, so it was nice being able to have some breathing room while shooting the play and then using the crop tool to get closer to the action. However, all was not perfect. Despite great light, if I did a pan too fast while shooting the camera couldn’t keep up and the image would get very distorted creating an effect I’ve never seen before:

f/8 @ 100mm for 1/800 sec at ISO 400

I had a few dozen pics like that, some of which were much worse, but I won’t hold it against the camera as this camera was never designed to be a action sports camera. That said, I wonder if it will potentially be addressed with a firmware fix in the future.

Going back into the studio, here’s an unedited shot that shows how amazing this camera is with skin tones and textures, but it also highlights the danger of use the ambiance auto white balance setting when you get back to the studio:

f/13 @ 88mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 125

Fortunately, I have the raw image so that’s a problem that’s easy to fix. However, the HIF suffers from a yellow background and the kids got unnecessarily scolded for not brushing their teeth properly – ha ha!

Speaking of textures, this camera just blew me away with every photo, so I sometimes found myself just trying things to see how much detail it would capture. Here’s another shot of my daughter in her Korean Hanbok:

f/13 @ 81mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 125

The detail in her hair, the dress, and the ribbon just make me grin every time I'm zoom in. It's going to be tough returning this camera back to B&H at the end of this review!

Speaking of detail, look at the detail in the cliff on this handheld shot of Snoqualmie Falls. Now this one is lightly edited in Lightroom due to the mixed light, but you can click the image to see the unedited original:

f/6.4 @ 45mm for 1/160 sec at ISO 320

This is a really tough shot because if you expose for the falls, the cliff is totally blown out. If you expose for the cliff (as I’ve done here) then you black out the falls. Knowing the range of this camera, I just exposed for the cliff and figured I could work it out at home – and I was right. The only problem here was that I needed a wider angle lens so I could capture more sky and the bottom of the falls, but alas the compromised shot still wasn’t too shabby for a handled snap.

Just in case you were wondering, here’s the full shot of the falls in portrait orientation zoomed out to the max at 45mm:

f/8 @ 45mm for 1/80 sec at ISO 1250

And just for fun, here’s another shot taken of the falls at that same spot using the Acros film simulation mode instead of Velvia:

f/8 @ 45mm for 1/80 sec at ISO 1250

Speaking of mixed light, this camera had me embracing mixed light instead of avoiding. The next two photos of my daughter in the park gave me a chance to play with the mixed light and I was rewarded:

f/4 @ 96mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 250

.

f/4 @ 78mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 125

That said, even light and underexposed shots still gave me a lot to work with in post-processing. Here’s one that I’ve left unedited for this article, but it was one of my favorites after cropping it to a portrait orientation and selectively lighting up my daughters face similar to the way God did in the above shots:

f/4 @ 100mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 250

In this next shot, I tried to do too much in one shot. With that gorgeous mountain and beautiful blue sky behind them, I couldn’t help myself.

f/7.1 @ 96mm for 1/110 sec at ISO 80

This shot, using the Velvia/Vivid film simulation mode, exaggerated the colors in a tasteful way that reminded me why I love shooting with Fujifilm cameras. I know some hate it and call it Velveeta, but I’m not in that camp.

Here’s another shot that I intentionally took at 1 stop underexposed so I could avoid blowing out the back right corner. Obviously I need to brighten it up on post processing, but it’s a common shot that I do for a lot of my reviews so I thought I’d include it:

Velvia - f/8 @ 45mm for 14 sec at ISO 80

This was also a 14 seconds exposure about 30 minutes before sunset in the shade, so I was happy with how much the lens and sensor gathered. Here’s one mnore that was done for 15 seconds with the Sepia film simulation applied in-camera:

Sepia - f/8 @ 45mm for 15 sec at ISO 80

For more images, visit https://photos.ronmartblog.com/fujifilm/gfx100sii/.

A Funny Thing

While taking this photo of a creek, I decided to take versions at multiple aperture settings just to examine if there were any diffraction issues:

f/32 @ 45mm for 8/10 sec at ISO 80

In the oddest of things happened, the files got larger as the f-stop number got smaller! As a result, in a few cases I had to crop in order to reduce the size to get the file size under the 64MB limit of my hosting site, Zenfolio!

Zenfolio limits originals to 64mb - who knew?!

This meant I had to crop a little off the edges to get the file under the 64mb limit as shown here in Lightroom Classic:

No important details were lost, but I needed to clip the edges to upload for this review

And below is the file in question at f/16, but ironically the f/22 file was smaller and totally fine to upload:

f/16 @ 45mm for 1/5 sec at ISO 80

The f/11 version had the same issue, but it required even more cropping so I just left it out of this review.

Film Simulation Modes

Ask any experienced film photographer what is the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Fujifilm and the answer will almost always be great color. What sets Fujifilm cameras apart from other digital cameras is that perfect transition of color film to the digital area for amazing in-camera results. I’ve done this type of discussion many times in other articles, so I won’t do a comprehensive review.

Here are just a few samples of the same shot with some different in-camera film simulation modes taken using the handy film simulation bracketing drive mode. This allows you to push the shutter release button once and get up to three different film simulation modes applied to the same shot.

Conclusion

I’m in love with Fujifilm all over again. It’s going to be tough returning this camera because I love the detail that the sensor captures, and the lens was great. Having 45-100mm zoom really gave me a lot of options with only one lens, so I never really felt myself wanting for another lens.

I can easily recommend this camera for the serious photographer and unlike its predecessor, it’s not a tripod only camera best left for landscapes and studio work – this one really can do almost anything.

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today.

Other articles you may enjoy

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy my other recent Fujifilm review entitled REVIEW: FUJIFILM X100VI - Is it better than you smartphone?

Enjoy this and more on the Reviews tab.

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REVIEW: FUJIFILM X100VI - Is it better than you smartphone?

FUJIFILM X100VI 40.2MP APS-C with 23mm f/2 Lens

It’s been since 2019 that I’ve reviewed a Fujifilm camera and that’s a shame. I forgot how much I’ve enjoyed the Fujifilm platform. If my memory serves me correctly the original X100 was the first X series camera I ever reviewed!

While there are numerous improvements that addressed my complaints of the early x100 and x100s, the form factor and purpose remain the same – and that’s a good thing. What’s more, the support for teleconverters means that you can get a little more functionality out of this fixed length permanently attached lens – if you so desire.

Overview

You can click the photo at the top of the article to get all the specs at B&H, so I’m not going to bore you with that. I’m also going to get closer to the modern era by introducing this camera with a video overview instead of a wall of words:

It’s a super well built and designed camera that really has few faults for someone interested in this formfactor and feature set.

Real World Images

Click here to see a gallery of some of the photos I took using the X100VI during my time reviewing it. As usual, these are all straight out of the camera with one notable exception. This camera supports HEIF, but Zenfolio doesn’t provide a good way to give you direct access to them, so I had to convert all HEIF files to JPEG (when applicable). Inline images were resized by Zenfolio, but you can download full size originals of the images that Lightroom converted from HEIF to JPG for inclusion in this gallery.

Here are my thoughts on a few photos that I found worth discussing:

Here’s one of the first pics I took with this camera right out of the box with the camera default settings and before I bothered to read the manual to refresh my memory on how to set the autofocus point:

f/2 @ 23mm for 1/125 sec at ISO 1250

As you can see the bokeh is fabulous and the detail is quite good in the raindrops despite, literally pointing and shooting like a newbie to cameras would do! If you want to know what do you really get over a cell phone, here’s a good place to start looking!

I was also pleased that for ISO 1250 that it looked this good to begin with. This particular photo was the exact in-camera JPEG as I hadn’t discovered yet that it supported HEIF at this point in the review.

Here’s another impressive handheld shot at only 1/35 sec yet the gloomy day required ISO 8000! The detail and default processing was amazing:

f/5.6 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 8000

I was super impressed with the detail of the fine grain details in the center of the flower that didn’t get destroyed by in-camera noise reduction, and the default color was fantastic!

Here’s a jaw dropping example of the quality of this lens and the in-camera images event at ISO 5000:

f/6.4 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 5000

I’m very pessimistic these days about lugging cameras around as cell phones have become so good, but this definitely reminded me that I might need to spend more time with the latest cameras again as this was a very impressive result!

Here’s a pretty boring photo, but again these were camera default settings doing pure point and shoot (except I did manually set the aperture). In this case I was too lazy to lay on the ground, so I just held the camera down at the level of the slug, tapped the screen like I’d do with my phone and took several photos:

f/8 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 5000

This did pretty good knowing how I took the shot – especially with a 23mm lens not known for being a good focal length for macro photography.

On a camping trip to the North Cascades in Washington, I woke up to see this beautiful scene so I grabbed the camera and just did a quick snap before going back to bed.

f/16 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 800

This shot would be one of my first experimentations with a large f stop number to see if there have been massive improvements with diffraction, but ultimately that didn’t appear to be the case.

A little later I’d try again (below), but still the trees in the background are pretty soft for f/16:

f/16 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 500

In brighter conditions at a low ISO, the f/16 results were significantly better so the poor quality of the previous two photos may have been attributed to the fog and losses caused by noise reduction.

f/16 @ 23mm for 1/40 sec at ISO 125

By this point I had also enabled the Velvia film simulation mode which Fujifilm is famous for, and it did not disappoint. The colors were amazing for this scene – if you like vivid images. If not, there’s a wide variety of film simulations to suit your taste.

I love the Velvia film simulation in the woods, but some might be turned off with how it crushes some of the shadow areas as shown at the base of the trees in this shot:

f/11 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 2000

It also gives the water a more of an unnatural tint so some might find it better to manually process a shot like this from raw to get the best results.

Without resorting to manual settings or flash, I just took this picture of Kai (yeah, he’s grown up) the way a newbie would using default settings:

f/2.8 @ 23mm for 1/150 sec at ISO 125

This is a type of shot where modern phones with their in-camera HDR can’t be beat – the results are very disappointing, so amateurs will need a better understanding of light (e.g., turn Kai into the light and avoid harsh backlight) or they’ll be frustrated compared to what they see they can accomplish with their phone.

Case in point, here’s what a iPhone 13 Pro photo of Kai taken in the same exact spot looked like straight from the phone:

Apple iPhone 13 Pro f/2.8 @ 9mm for 1/121 sec at ISO 64

So, if your goal is to take advantage of the shadows and get a more creative lighting shot then iPhone will be frustrating, but if you want a no brainer shot that is easy and just does HDR perfectly, it’s still tough to beat the best smart phones.

Here’s another example where the lighting was much more favorable:

f/4 @ 23mm for 1/250 sec at ISO 125

Yet, despite great light and God’s soft box being out in full force, with no exposure compensation the image was rather dark. Again, compared to the iPhone where the results were much more pleasing:

Apple iPhone13 Pro f/1.5 @ 5.7mm for 1/1377 sec at ISO 50

Right after this shot I started experimenting with the eye auto focus feature and got a much better result:

f/2 @ 23mm for 1/480 sec at ISO 125

This made me suspect that the default metering was to blame, so had I changed that setting I could have got results that are actually superior to the iPhone.

This also made me think about selfies – the feature that smart phone users seem to love the most. While I was out on the lake with my wife, I took a shot of my ugly mug completely blind but using the eye auto focus feature:

f/4.5 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 160

This time, despite the sun setting with mediocre light, it did great. I’m also pleased to report that my old face didn’t destroy the camera. The Velvia mode made my skin appear a little more red than I’d like, but the rest of the scene looked great.

I was very satisfied with the quality of the lens and the super sharp details found in so many of the photos I took:

f/8 @ 23mm for 1/35 sec at ISO 500

This combined with great high ISO performance and visually satisfying colors (IMHO), made me happy to have this camera with me for my trip to the mountains.

I got a chance to give the burst mode a shot out on the ice, and while my framing was terrible, the results were good for this class of camera. Shooting on ice is tough so this is where you’ll need to experiment with the exposure compensation (+2 in this case), the white balance (florescent), and much more:

f/2.2 @ 23mm for 1/500 sec at ISO 1250

For the shots in this series I used the eye autofocus to see what it could do and I was satisfied with the results. I sucked, but the camera did its part. The iPhone was much easier to use, but I preferred the color I got using the X100 VI.

Video

While I did experiment a little bit with the video features, those who know me know that I’m not really a videographer. As a result, I can only say that it offers a wide variety of formats and settings that are certain to be superior to results found on a phone,

Viewfinder

The viewfinder on this camera supports both optical as well as digital, and that’s a good thing. The optical offers a traditional photography experience whereas the digital offers a way to see photos as they will appear on your computer or phone even in the harshest sunlight. It also provides a way to save battery when you elect to enable the EVF and turn off the rear display.

Conclusion

Once again I was reminded of the magic of Fujifilm and wasn’t disappointed one bit. Thanks to the Q menu, the touch screen and great controls, I was able to quickly dial in my favorite settings in a hurry to get the shots that I wanted. While I haven’t included many of those photos here for personal reasons, I do find this to be an extremely easy camera to use for those who understand the settings and features it offers.

I never had any battery life issues and could easily go a few days under normal usage without having to worry about recharging. When I did, I appreciated the support for USB-C to get a quick charge right in the camera.

Overall, this is a camera for photographers – not newbies – mainly because the best results will be achieved by knowing how to dial in the best settings. If you want smartphone results, use a smartphone, but if you are wanting better control over the lighting, color, shadows, and shutter speed, then this camera is going to be much more satisfying to use. If that's you, then I highly recommend this camera. 

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today, or click here see other great cameras in the Fujifilm X-Series line up.

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Imagenomic Portraiture 3 ai Discount and Video Review - 2022 Edition

Check out the latest tutorial using this image and more

Video Tutorial

Check out my latest video tutorial on Imagenomic Portraiture 3 ai:

Before and After Images

Click to view the full original unedited image

Click to view the full image after Portraiture 3 ai editing

Conclusion

I've been using this product since it first came out and still to this date there's nothing I like more. Check out the free demo for Photoshop and Lightroom to see for yourself - it really makes skin enhancements a simple one minute step in your photo editing workflow.

Where to Buy?

CLICK HERE to learn more or buy today.

Enter the code and click update to apply the discount

Enjoy these and more on the Reviews tab as well as Ron's Recommendations.

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Printing Your Memories with the EPSON SureLab D870

Want to print a large number of photos blazingly fast at a price that doesn’t break the bank, yet has a professional look and feel? I did, so I wrote this review to see if the EPSON SureLab D870 lived up to its promises and my very high standards as a professional print master, print book author and Senior Program Manager of the Microsoft Windows print team for 3 years.

If you are here just for the review of this printer designed for professional photographers then you can skip the next section. If you are a photography hobbyist or someone with a lot of photos that you wish you had time to print, then you may enjoy the background story below about why I am writing this article.

Background Story

According to my photo library management software, Mylio, I have roughly 450,000 photos saved on my NAS and for my phones I have 100,000+ in Google Photos plus 22,000 in iCloud. Now out of those roughly 572k photos I’ve made about 30k public and shown my family about another 10k or so on top of that. Let’s assume I’m being too conservative though and say that the total number of photos seen by eyes other than mine is really 72,000 photos. That means I have a half million photos that have never been seen by others, and that’s from someone who is internationally known for photography AND printing!!!!

Now I will admit that because I shoot in burst mode, there’s probably plenty of photos that my eyes have only glanced at once or twice. However, this past March I had a lot of time to think as I drove from Seattle to Texas (and back) to bury my Dad. While I was at his place in a rural Texas town I found myself enjoying old family prints from the time before digital photography. It kinda hit me like a ton of bricks that I wasn’t judging these photos for their composition, sharpness, color, etc… – I was just enjoying the walk down memory lane.This reminded me of a common complaint from my wife who tells me “you have all those photos, but they are useless because I can’t even see any of them”.

Now we do enjoy plenty of photos on our Meural digital frames as well as the fantastic photo frame experience of the Google Nest Hub Max, so if you aren’t doing that I still highly recommend that. My wife enjoys printing her cell phone photos with her Epson PictureMate, and I’m a heavy user of my EPSON P800 and P5000 printers for my fine art photography work. However, there’s a decade of digital photos that live on my redundant NAS storage devices that really need to be combed through so I can print those memories to be enjoyed the good old fashioned way – by holding them in a hand – long after me and my NAS devices, digital frames and phones are long gone. More importantly, they need to be enjoyed by my kids and future grandkids (hopefully) as I have enjoyed the print photos my parents and generations before them took.

As I was driving through beautiful places like Moab, Utah during my long drive I got to thinking about how sad it would be if my family couldn’t enjoy the experience of seeing my photos because they got lost due to some digital tragedy after I was gone. Sure I have lots of digital backups, but what if those after me just simply stopped tracking all of that data and ultimately it was lost? What would be left? Just the prints – and most likely just the ones in good old fashion photo albums or printed photo books.

Now my success with this blog has given me a benefit many of you don’t have, so my cost at trying photo print services, printing photo books, archiving photos digitally, making professional prints, etc… is usually $0.00. With the cost excuse out of the way, I still have my wife complaining that she doesn’t know happened for most of the years we were dating and the first 10 years of my sons life outside of what you see on the blog (which is also what’s on our digital frames). Why is that? I have no excuses, right?

Well, it turns out that I still work 60+ hour weeks despite the fact that I’m not blogging like I used to. I’m also the father of 4 children which includes active 11 and 4 year old kids who need to spend time with Dad when he stops his workaholic days, so my free time usually begins around 10:00 PM at night (which was the start of my blogging work day years ago). Weekends end up being family time as well, so I’m lucky to get 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there to do activities that I enjoy – like editing or printing personal photos. With these constraints, I find myself getting deeper in the hole each month as I still shoot photos regularly, but I fail to find to edit or print photos that aren’t for my clients or blog. Simply put, my cherished personal photos don’t get prioritized – sound familiar?

Sure, I occasionally tell myself I’m going to do it and then I find myself falling into the second trap – I end up going through a few dozen photos and then spending all my personal time editing one or two of these photos. At this pace it would take me a few centuries to accomplish my goal of leaving prints that memorialize my wonderful life for generations that come after me.

When I had this discussion with my wife she challenged me – why don’t you just identify the best family photos and JUST PRINT THEM. She insisted – don’t waste your time editing them because its better to leave the memories behind than it is to have them lost because you couldn’t let the professional photographer inside you forgive yourself for not making professional images. She even went so far to remind me about my strict policy of publishing photos on the blog for camera and lens reviews that are 100% unedited (all are in-camera JPEG), so why couldn’t I do the same for my digital memories and “just print the damn things”.

Again, is any of this ringing a bell with you?

Well, its my own love of photo editing and desire to have my important pictures that have been a mental block keeping me from doing what I needed to do, so I made a pact with her and myself that I’d finally address this problem. My objective – to print my collection – but obviously not all 500k+ photos – just the memories through the years.

I started with my 2007 photos collection – the year I got serious about digital photography (after years of “thankfully” being a film photographer with prints – albeit very bad ones). After 3 months of pouring through – just that one years worth of photos – I identified about 460 images that seemed to be worth printing. I took 22,271 photos that year, so roughly 2% were what I’d consider “family classics” that I’d want to hand down to generations after me. They also represent just over an hour of printing by the amazing SureLab D870.

Wow – after the long battle of pouring through all of these photos – and admittedly probably spending too long in Lightroom doing minor tweaks on some of them – it took me 3 months to pinpoint the photos and a little over an hour to have a big stack of 4x6 prints to put in a photo album or at least a shoebox (guess what I actually did :). I didn’t have to then upload them to some service and fight with its UI, I didn’t have to deal with a ROES system for a service built for volume printing, I didn’t have to fight the crappy tools to build photo albums that never preserve my desired aspect ratios so I end up spending weeks to build a simply 20 page “book”.

No, this was much easier – I just dumped all of the files out as Full Size JPEG’s, went to the folder in Windows Explorer, selected all of the photos then did a right-click and Print (which launches the native Windows Photo Print Wizard). 

REVIEW: Epson SureLab D870

EPSON describes this printer as “The fast minilab printer for demanding small-format photo production”, and I’d say that actually hits the nail on the head. This six ink dye-based ink printer is optimized to print 4" x 6" prints in as fast as 8.3 seconds (using 720 x 360 dpi) and up to 430 4" x 6" prints, 275 5" x 7" prints, or 140 8" x 10" prints per hour – that’s screaming fast!!!

This means if you are a school, event or wedding portrait photographer you can print the bulk of your photos on this printer very quickly even if you have a huge amount of photos to print. What’s more, the Epson SureLab Luster Photo Inkjet roll paper and Epson UltraChrome D6r-S Light Ink Cartridges are extremely affordable, so you will not only save time but your cost per print will be peanuts compared to SureColor professional printers – yet they will have that same high-quality professional feel same in the hand to your clients. While its true you will sacrifice the archival and tonal range characteristics of the UltraChrome^® inks, it does allow you to have more competitive pricing for the time and money you’ll save with this solution. You can also still use your professional pigment ink printers for the larger prints sold at a premium price.

Simply put, if you print a lot of prints for your business – this is a no-brainer purchase that will quickly yield a return on your investment as you enjoyed with your 70-200 f/2.8 lens! However, I’m not and many of my readers aren’t either.

I decided to review this printer with a slightly different intention – does this printer make sense for the hobbyist to print their collection and can it produce results that are better than the typical low budget print services (e.g., Costco, Walgreens, Shutterfly, etc…).

How I Printed 495 Photo Print Jobs

I identified the photos I wanted to print in Lightroom and then exported out all of my pics as full-size sRGB JPEG files to the same folder. I would then select all, right click and choose print. This launches the Print Pictures wizard whereby I set the settings as shown above and then then clicked options to modify the printer driver as follows:

Don't forget to change the Color Management setting to ICM for best results!!!!

This gave perfect borderless prints, but the prints were dark. This was easily corrected by changing the Color Management to ICM with no other changes necessary in the Advanced… settings.

Like all borderless printing, if your aspect ratio of your images don’t match the output you are going to lose quite a bit of picture detail. As a result, you may choose to NOT do borderless to avoid that. If you go down that route some 4x6 prints taken from 3:2 aspect ratio source images may have a small white line on one edge of the photo but its not bothersome to me.

Sorry Mac users, I only tested on Windows 10 1909 over USB, so I have no comments about using this printer from a Mac.

I did successfully print to this printer from Lightroom and Photoshop, but this method was by far the fastest and recommended to me by my friends at EPSON. After much experimentation, I agreed and stuck to this method throughout my time with this printer.

Oh and if you are wondering why I had 495 photos – well that was just the limit I gave myself for each year worth of photos.

Actual Observed Performance

When printing 4x6 borderless prints I observed it took an average of 7.2 seconds per print which excludes the nearly 2 minutes it took for the Windows Print Wizard to create the print job and then another 4 minutes it took Windows to spool the 6GB print jobs (495 photos) I would throw at it. I excluded that as my Windows system is getting a little old so a faster performing system might be much quicker.

Conclusion

Pouring through tons of photos to identify the ones you want to print is really the big time sync. I completely underestimated how long this task would take – especially given my crazy busy work schedule. I could have been less picky when pouring through 20,000+ photos per year, but 500 pics creates a pile of photos over 6 inches tall that then need to be dealt with later (e.g., put in a photo album, or even organized in a shoebox). Sadly when printing this any when the photos pile up they don’t end up in a meaningful order, they just get mixed all together out of order. This means I ended up with a huge pile of photos that needed to be sorted once again by hand.

I definitely think the quality of the luster prints I got was very good but obviously not as good as I can get from my SureColor printers with a complete color managed workflow in Lightroom/Photoshop or with Epson Print Layout.

For a consumer who can afford a large format printer or $2000+ lens, I think this is definitely a great investment to print your own 4x6, 5x7, 8x10 or letter size prints at home – especially now during COVID-19. I’d much prefer to do my own than send them off to a service – especially with the hassle of having to upload all of the photos and configure the settings for the photos (or god forbid dealing with horrible ROES systems).

Obviously if you are the budget conscious type or one who thinks Costco / Walgreens / Shutterfly prints are just fine, then go for it. I’m not that type as I’m pretty picky and I don’t like a big pile of prints that don’t look even close to color accurate to me.

If you are a wedding, event, portrait photographer, etc.. – this is a no brainer investment. Yes, you’ll still want a SureColor printer for your large prints and the Bride’s wedding album, but for everything else these prints are going to look very professional and make your clients happy.

The only knocks I really have against this printer is that the lack of pigment means these prints aren’t going to last as long, which I care about for archival purposes. That said, I think they’ll look significant better in 40 years than the prints my parents took of me and had developed at the drug store, so really its more of an academic discussion than anything else. If a photo was so important that it needed a 200+ year archival lifespan then I’d print it on the SureColor anyway – and it won’t be hundreds of prints!

So, if you can afford it – get it. Its a big upfront investment that will pay off quickly thanks to super inexpensive ink and paper. The performance will give you back valuable time and you'll avoid being the most hated family member for sucking all your household bandwidth uploading photos to print services.

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