Fujinon XF 18mm f/2 R lens

In summary

The compact size and moderately wide field of view make this lens well-suited to everyday shooting. It is also small, light and inconspicuous enough to be ideal for street photography and produces a natural-looking perspective that suits some types of landscape and cityscape shooting.

As a relatively fast lens, it is capable of achieve a quite shallow depth-of-field when using short focus distances, although its minimum focusing distance of 18 cm limits the types of suitable subjects. The field of view is roughly the same as that of a typical smart-phone and the lens is small enough to be a good choice for one of Fujifilm’s smaller ILCs.

Full review

Fujifilm’s XF 18mm f/2 R has been around for about six years but we’ve only just obtained a review sample. Compact and lightweight, its ‘pancake’ design reduces its length to just over four centimetres and its weight to 116 grams. The 18mm focal length is equivalent to 27mm in 35mm format which is a modest wide angle that is suitable for applications like street photography, where its fast maximum aperture is advantageous.

The compact and lightweight XF 18mm f/2 R  lens, shown without its lens hood. (Source: Fujifilm.)

The optical design is relatively complex for a prime lens, with eight elements in seven groups. It includes  a pair of glass-moulded aspherical elements in the fifth and seventh positions, which reduce distortion and spherical aberrations. The first one (5th element) also increases the maximum aperture, while the other (7th element) reduces the overall thickness of the lens.

The final element, positioned as closely to the sensor as possible, makes the incidence angle of light reaching the sensor smaller to optimise light distribution.  A Super EBC coating is also applied to individual elements to reduce flare and ghosting and deliver improved contrast and colour accuracy. The rounded seven-blade iris diaphragm ensures a pleasing bokeh quality.

The lens is supplied with front and end caps and a square metal lens hood that attaches via a bayonet mount. A rubber cap is provided for fitting over the front of the hood. A soft lens pouch should also be provided.

Who’s it For?
The compact size and moderately wide field of view make this lens well-suited to everyday shooting. It is also small, light and inconspicuous enough to be ideal for street photography and produces a natural-looking perspective that suits some types of landscape and cityscape shooting.

As a relatively fast lens, it is capable of achieve a quite shallow depth-of-field when using short focus distances, although its minimum focusing distance of 18 cm limits the types of suitable subjects. The field of view is roughly the same as that of a typical smart-phone and the lens is small enough to be a good choice for one of Fujifilm’s smaller ILCs.

Autofocusing is handled by a micro-motor, which isn’t the latest technology and can be noisy at times. Consequently, this lens is not the best choice when shooting video.

Build and Ergonomics
Build quality is generally good, although this lens is not weather-resistant. The metal barrel is tightly assembled and based on a metal mounting plate. The supplied lens hood is also made from metal. The hood adds about 15 mm to the overall length of the lens.

The focusing ring is located about 2 mm behind the bayonet fitting for the lens hood. It’s roughly 8 mm wide and totally covered by narrow ribbing. The ring turns smoothly through a full 360 degrees with no stops at either end of the range. When fitted to an X-Series camera, if the camera was in manual mode, a distance scale is displayed on both the EVF and monitor screens.

Like all Fujinon lenses, this lens is equipped with dedicated aperture ring. It’s located just behind the focusing ring and is much the same width.  This ring has seven aperture settings, marked in full-stop increments with distinct 1/3 EV click-stops between them plus an A setting at the f/16 end of the range that sets the aperture to automatic control.

Focusing is controlled electronically and in manual focus mode there is virtually no tactile feedback.  X-Series cameras will display a distance scale on both the EVF and monitor screens when the camera is in manual mode. Even though it’s quite small, it provides a fair estimate of the focused distance.  

The bundled lens hood attaches via a bayonet fitting that was easy to use on the review lens. The hood slopes inwards and ends in a rectangular shape that provides good protection against stray light without interfering with image capture. Unfortunately, the rubber cap supplied with the hood is very easy to dislodge.

Performance
We tested the review lens on the new X-T3 camera and all test results show JPEG files. The first thing we noticed when using this lens is how noisy its AF motor was. Perhaps could be is partly due to the age of the lens (which was first released back in 2012) and the fact that it had been used a fair bit. But on checking several previous reviews, we found other reviewers had also found this lens noisy, which makes it unsuitable for shooting video.

We had no issues with autofocusing speed, which was largely dictated by the test camera, although the short focal length and wide maximum aperture created no impediments to fast focusing. AF accuracy was also very good, although object tracking accuracy was only fair.

Imatest showed the review lens to be a fair performer, falling a little short of meeting expectations for the X-T3’s 26-megapixel sensor at the highest centre resolution, which occurred at f/4. There was a moderate amount of edge softening at all aperture settings (examples are shown below) and resolution at the widest couple of apertures was disappointing.

Diffraction began to take effect at around f/8, after which resolution declined gradually. The graph below shows the result of our tests.

Lateral chromatic aberration remained well within the negligible band at all aperture settings. We found no evidence of coloured fringing in test shots.  The graph below shows the results of our Imatest tests.

Because the X-T3 provides automatic in-camera corrections for vignetting and distortion, we assessed these factors by looking at RAF.RAW files, which were converted into TIFF format with Capture One for Fujifilm software. We found the lens showed little or no rectilinear distortion.

Slight vignetting was detected at the widest aperture in raw files and continued to be visible through to f/4 but had  disappeared by f/5.6. Neither vignetting nor distortion would be problematic to photographers who shoot JPEG files and raw files can easily be corrected during conversion or with subsequent editing.

We found traces of veiling flare when a bright light source was just outside the image frame but little evidence of ghosting or flare artefacts in contre-jour subjects. Normally backlit subjects were generally handled very well.

With a minimum focus of 18 cm, this lens is not really suitable for close-ups unless subjects are relatively large. The f/2 maximum aperture provides some scope for differential focusing with suitable subjects. Bokeh was reasonably smooth, although we found slight outlining around circular highlights.

Conclusion

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