FUJIFILM Fujinon XF27mmF2.8 R Weather Resistant Lens

Product Information

I finally saw my first DSLR-tourist actually changing lenses in public in Croatia! Swapping out one beast for another looks positively silly, not to mention making you a target for thieves who could become very rich by snagging that lens out of your patient partner’s hands. To even get this shot I had to shoot several samples at different focus points with different apertures to find the right combo. There are no lateral color fringes as shot on the X-T1 as JPGs, which is probably correcting any if there were any. Lens sharpness has nothing to do with picture sharpness; every lens made in the past 100 years is more than sharp enough to make super-sharp pictures if you know what you're doing. The only limitation to picture sharpness is your skill as a photographer. It's the least talented who spend the most time worrying about lens sharpness and blame crummy pictures on their equipment rather than themselves. Skilled photographers make great images with whatever camera is in their hands; I've made some of my best images of all time with an irreparably broken camera! Most pixels are thrown away before you see them, but camera makers don't want you to know that. The viewfinder is par for the course for this class of cameras, though not outstanding. The bigger issue is that, even though you'll want to press the Drive/Delete button with your left thumb, you'll almost certainly trigger the eye sensor to switch from the rear screen to using the EVF. It's a pain. And while the camera doesn't automatically switch to the EVF when you trigger the sensor with the screen tilted out, it does rotate the screen 180 degrees; the info display is flipped to seemingly prepare you for taking a selfie.

People worry waaaaay too much about sharpness. It's not 1968 anymore when lenses often weren't that sharp and there could be significant differences among them; today they are all pretty much equally fantastic. Even under the most devious conditions I could devise, all I got was one dim purple blob as seen here. With a 7-bladed rounded diaphragm I get soft 14-pointed sunstars on brilliant points of light only at the smallest apertures.If you shoot raw and use non-manufacturer software to process the raw data into images, that software is unlikely to be able to correct any distortion that may be corrected in-camera as JPGs. In practice, we found the auto-focus to be quite fast and accurate, but it is noisy enough to be heard when recording video, making this lens best suited to stills photography. At Plitvice Lakes National Park it was absolutely essential to have a slightly wider-angle lens than my usual 35mm. The specifications might look pretty unadventurous, but this is a terrific little pancake prime that deserves a place in any Fujifilm fan’s camera bag, especially users who like to travel light and use unobtrusive kit.

If you're not getting ultra-sharp pictures with this, be sure not to shoot at f/11 where all lenses are softer due to diffraction, always shoot at ISO 100 or below because cameras become softer at ISO 200 and above, avoid shooting across long distances over land which can lead to atmospheric heat shimmer, be sure everything is in perfect focus, set your camera's sharpening as you want it (I usually set mine to the maximum) and be sure nothing is moving, either camera or subject. If you want to ensure a soft image with any lens, shoot at ISO 1,600 or above at default sharpening in daylight of subjects at differing distances in the same image. In the lower mode you get maximum DR, but Raw files that are a bit noisier when brightened than those shot natively using the upper gain mode. At the upper gain mode, the sensor prioritizes low noise levels, at the cost of some dynamic range. Fujifilm kept the glass inside the new lens the same as the old one. There are seven elements in five groups with seven rounded blades. The minimum focus distance is a little more than 13 inches, which is decent enough but not great. The 27mm focal-length is 40.5mm full-frame equivalent, which is barely wide-angle, and is very close to “normal” on Fujifilm X cameras. The maximum aperture is f/2.8, which isn’t particularly fast, and the minimum aperture is f/16. The lens accepts 39mm threaded filters. When used on the X-mount cameras in their 1:1 square crop mode, it sees the same angle of view as a 95mm lens sees when used on a 6x6 cm (2¼"square) medium-format camera. This is about the same as a 50mm lens sees when used on a 35mm camera.The 27mm pancake lens is a fraction of the size and weight of my other Fuji lenses, and in the last few months – my most used lens! Shooting wide open, the XF 27mm has solid sharpness through about 80 percent of the frame. The corners and edges are slightly softer. Corners sharpen up around f4.5. While sharpness is relatively good through the image, it pales in comparison to the corner-to-corner sharpness that I’ve seen from high-priced Sony GM and Nikkor Z lenses lately. However, in real-world shooting, I thought the lens had a good balance between sharp subjects and being so sharp that you see every pore and imperfection. Lens Character elements in 5 groups, a common double-Gauss variant extremely popular for normal lenses since about 1950. If this 1,200×900 pixel crop is about 3" (7.5cm) wide on your phone, then the complete image printed at this same extreme magnification would be about 11 × 16" (0.9 × 1.3 feet or 25 × 40 cm). Nature, architecture, people – this lens is great for the wide variety of subjects you’ll encounter on your travels.

The X-E4 may not be an obvious choice for video work, given its rangefinder-style body, but it is actually quite capable. In terms of output, it can shoot oversampled DCI and UHD 4K video in 24 or 30 fps (30-minute cap on continuous capture). Full HD video can be captured at up to a whopping 240 fps. Do you bring your camera with you wherever you go? Have you ever left it at home or the hotel because it’s just too heavy? is also a pancake lens, but at 18mm it’s much more of a wide angle lens than the 27mm. On the upside, Another competitor with similar specs is the SLR-style Nikon Z50. Both it and the X-E4 are well-rounded cameras offering plenty of capability. We prefer the Nikon's ergonomics and control points, but appreciate Fujifilm's considerably larger family of native APS-C lenses. You'll get a bit more resolution from the X-E4, but not an earth-shattering amount, along with slightly more detailed 4K. But your choice between these two may ultimately come down to preference between SLR- or rangefinder-style.

Dynamic range

If this 1,200×900 pixel crop is about 6" (15cm) wide on your screen, then the complete image printed at this same extreme magnification would be about 21 × 31" (1.7 × 2.6 feet or 50 × 80 cm). The 41mm effective focal length might not be wide enough for some (or too wide for others), but all round we think it’s probably more useful than the standard ‘nifty fifty’. Similarly, the f/2.8 maximum aperture is nothing to shout about these days, but this lens is so slim, tiny and light that we would take that any day for general walkaround photography and keep Fujifilm’s big ‘bokeh’ lenses for when they’re needed.

On an APS-C body the 27mm performs like a 41mm (35mm equiv) lens and optically seems pretty sharp. I’m noticing it performs better close than it does at infinity focus, but this is partly due to exaggerations of camera shake on objects far away when shooting hand held and the lens does not give you a lot of support for steading these smaller cameras, especially when dealing with the resolving power of 24 megapixels with Fujifilm’s newer cameras. It toggles between auto aperture control (the ring is set to A) or manual aperture control (the switch is set to one of the aperture values). If this 1,200×900 pixel crop is about 3" (7.5cm) wide on your phone, then the complete image printed at this same high magnification would be about 11 × 16" (0.9 × 1.3 feet or 25 × 40 cm). As I was getting ready to write this article, I was looking around my gear cabinet for this lens and I couldn’t locate it. When I did find it, the lens was attached to my wife’s X-T4! It turns out that the Fujinon XF 27mm f/2.8 R WR is her favorite lens. It seems that whenever I want to use it, the lens is attached to her camera. This is the only lens that we fight over. It has exactly the same optical formula as the original lens, being comprised of 7 elements in 5 groups including a glass moulded aspherical element which reduces image distortion and spherical aberration.While this lens has no Optical Image Stabilization, some cameras like the X-S10 have built-in sensor-shift Image Stabilization (IS, VR (Vibration Reduction) or Steady Shot), which works really well with this lens. The X-S10's internal stabilization adds about a 3½-stop real-word improvement, which is really good! The focus ring is fairly narrow, but still pretty generous given the very short barrel, and it’s easy to find with your fingertips without having to look. There’s no focus distance scale and hence no depth of field markings, but these can be displayed on the camera instead. I think there is a higher chance you’ll be bringing your camera along for your travels. Fujifilm XF 27mm f2.8 on an X-T1 It’s considered one of Fuji’s sharpest lenses This lens comes with a curious little ‘inverted’ lens hood which actually angles inwards not outwards. It does the job, though, without spoiling the slim profile of the lens and even offers some of the protection of a lenscap.