The beast that is the Fujica G690 was released in 1968, and earned itself the nickname ‘The Texas Leica’ for it’s extra large stature and Leica M3 rangefinder looks. It has nothing to do with Texas other than it’s colossal size, and was made by the Fuji Photo Film Company in Tokyo. Fuji wanted to design a no frills rugged medium format camera that handled like a 35mm, but with higher image quality.

My version is the 1969 BL - the second iteration with slight improvements over the original. It came with the 100mm f3.5 monster of a lens, which is in my opinion the best focal length out of the three options available - 65mm, 100mm and 150mm.

This model was advertised as working shutter, but double image not working! I interpreted this as the rangefinder patch was not working - and when it arrived this was the case. According to online sources this is a fairly easy part of the camera to access, so will need to be addressed. Considering it was bought for half the market value I think that is a steal. There are signs of age with scratches on the body and a dink on the front of the lens, but that is fine, as it is to use not look at.

I knew it was going to be big, but when you hold one for the first time - it really is big! You can see where the Texas reference comes from!

Before taking the top off to inspect the rangefinder issue, I wanted to run a film through to check the shutter, so loaded up some Ilford HP5 and very quickly got through the eight 6x9cm frames on the 120 roll!

To my delight everything exposure wise worked perfectly and the image quality is excellent. I simply used the distance on the focus scale and ignored the viewfinder patch. To be honest most of the shots were at infinity anyway. I think this first shot was at 1/250 f11 on a tripod. The level of detail is great - only limited by the grain of the 400 ISO film.

To test not only the lens’ distance scale, but also my ability to judge! This shot was focused at 10 meters, and I nailed it! Proving that the lens focus is accurate. With medium format you can really tell what aperture setting was being used - this was f5.6 so you are starting to get separation between the sharp focus point and softer background. Again using the tripod so I could concentrate on the camera settings. The camera is not unwieldy but with only 8 frames per roll you want to get the composition right so a tripod is a good idea.

Not wanting to shoot the whole roll in one environment, I finished the last few frames in the city - hand held. The resulting scans were really good.

So the 690 is working perfectly, now all there is to do is fix the rangefinder patch and clean the two marks off the lens visible in the first shot. Then it will be ready for a proper outing for some epic landscape photography - where the G690 will really shine.

Fujica G690 - The Texas Leica…

The MARTIAN’s have landed…