In 2024 I did a fresh review of the nearly ten year old Fujinon XF 16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR lens, and I concluded that it was due an update. It was clear that it hadn’t been engineered with future high resolution bodies in mind, and the current 40MP sensor in a camera like my X-H2 was fairly punishing to it. Fuji was clearly in the same headspace, and at the end of the 2024 they announced and released a Mark II version of the lens, and it is a great update. It’s both smaller and lighter and yet sharper at the same time, moves into some new territory in terms of at least one feature, and comes to market at the same MSRP as the original ($1199 USD). Is this a home run for Fuji? Find out in either the thorough video review or by reading on in the text review!

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Thanks to Fujifilm Canada for sending me a review copy of this lens.   As always, this is a completely independent review.  All opinions and conclusions are my own. I’m doing this review on a 40MP Fujifilm X-H2 camera. You can visit the product page for the 16-55mm II here.

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The very first thing that I noticed is how much smaller the new lens is. I’ve never owned the original lens, but I have used it for extended periods on multiple occasions, including on several trips, so I was very familiar with the size and weight of the previous lens. The new version is slimmer, shorter, and much lighter (37% according to Fuji), making for a lens that is more natural fit on a wider variety of Fuji’s cameras. I not only used it on my X-H2, but also on the new X-M5, which is one of the smallest of Fuji’s bodies. The lens felt a little big there, but that’s mostly because the camera has almost no grip. On most of the bodies, the new 16-55 II will be a comfortable fit due to the reduced size and weight. You can see just how much smaller the new lens looks when placed side by side with the original.

This is extremely important, as lenses like the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 DN coming to the platform had really highlighted just how unnecessarily large the older lens was. The new 16-55 II is still substantially larger than either the Sigma or the new Fuji 16-50mm F2.8-4.8, but that is perhaps to be expected considering that it has the largest zoom range, the constant F2.8 aperture, and is more feature rich than either of the other lenses.

But look how much the older lens towered over the competition:

But all of that would be in vain if this new lens wasn’t up to the task of handling Fuji’s high resolution 40MP sensors. Fortunately that isn’t a problem, and the new lens is capable of providing excellent sharpness and contrast on my X-H2.

My conclusion was that I was unsure the old lens was worth the price premium relative to the compact little Sigma (which I added to my own Fuji kit). Has that conclusion changed with the new lens? We’ll find out in today’s review…

Build and Handling

I’ll start this section by highlighting the fact that Fuji has FINALLY updated their lens feature formula a little bit here. Fuji’s main lens feature has always been the inclusion of an aperture ring, which is why most of their lenses have an “R” in the name, which stands for Ring. Despite their cameras becoming increasingly video focused (my X-H2 can shoot up to 8K video!), Fuji had never updated their lenses to the modern standard where the ability to declick the aperture is essentially for video work. A declicked aperture can be smoothly “racked” through the aperture options during video shots, allowing more or less to come into focus due to the aperture change. That has changed, and the 16-55 II becomes the first XF lens from Fuji to receive an option to declick the aperture.

The aperture otherwise works as before, with light clicks at one third stop apertures but markings only at full stops. When declicked, those clicks disappear and allow you to move smoothly through the aperture options. There is a locking mechanism that you need to depress if you want to move out of the manual range and into automatic (camera) control. Fuji has increased the amount of aperture blades from 9 to 11, allowing for more consistently circular specular highlights when the lens is stopped down.

Fuji’s standard is for AF | MF to be controlled from the camera, typically in the form of a camera-mounted lever, so there are no other buttons or switches on the lens. So far the idea of custom buttons seems to be reserved for telephoto lenses and not other lenses like this, which is a shame considering that those custom buttons can be a handy way to have additional control while shooting.

The front of the lens is occupied with first the zoom ring, and then the manual focus ring. The zoom ring isn’t as nicely damped as what I would expect for a premium lens, and I found it difficult to smoothly zoom during video capture.

The manual focus experience is only so-so as well, feeling like focus takes place in steps or chunks rather than a smooth linear movement.

The 16-55 II is a WR lens, meaning that it has weather resistance. That weather sealing takes the form of a gasket at the lens mount along with internal seals plus a fluorine coating on the front element to resist oil and moisture). This is very handy as you can continue to use the lens with confidence even when the weather turns a bit sour (providing you are shooting on a weather sealed camera).

It’s worth looking at a comparison of specs across some competitors, including the older lens (which remains on the market at the moment at a slightly discounted price).

The new lens has shrunk in basically all dimensions. It is 78.3mm in diameter (3.1″), whereas the older lens was 83.3mm (3.28″). It is only 95mm in length (3.7″) relative to the 106mm (4.17″) of the older lens. But it is the weight which is the most surprising, dropping from 655g (23oz) to just 410g (14.5oz). The difference between the 16-55 II and the Sigma 18-55mm is just 135g, while the difference with the older lens was a whopping 370g! This allows even the front filter size to shrink from 77mm to 72mm.

The inner barrel will extend an additional 27mm when zoomed to 55mm.

Fuji’s design language hasn’t really changed much over the years, so the look of this lens isn’t radically different, though the shape is a little more sculpted. It’s a nice looking lens, however, with just a little more gloss that speaks of it being a newer design.

A petal shaped lens hood is included. It’s plastic and ribbed on the inside to prevent stray light from bouncing around in there. It doesn’t have a lock, but it does bayonet firmly into place with a definite click.

It is always worth noting the zoom range here, which is incredibly useful. It goes wide (16mm), which is the equivalent of 24mm on full frame.

It zooms into 55mm, which is the equivalent of 84mm on full frame.

That gets you all the way into prime territory for portraits, which certainly adds to the value of the lens. There’s a lot of framing options even in a casual setting.

Another key area of improvement by Fuji is the amount of magnification. What’s interesting is that both lenses tout the same minimum focus distance of 30cm, but the new lens has a much higher 0.21x magnification relative to the 0.16x of the older lens. That can probably be attributed to some focus breathing by the older lens, whereas the new lens performs better up close.

I saw good results at close focus distance, like a close up of this tiny crystal piano’s keyboard.

It’s hard to complain about a lens that has managed to shed so much weight and still be effective.

Stills Autofocus

I’ll preface this section by saying that A) the 16-55 II is perhaps the best focusing XF lens that I’ve used to date and B) that the autofocus on Fuji cameras remains frustratingly behind what I find on other platforms. The most recent 5.x firmware updates for my X-H2 have made some improvements to stills autofocus, and I see less of a gap with the 16-55 II attached. Video autofocus remains a bit frustrating, however. With a first party lens like this, it becomes impossible to parse out what behavior is camera-specific and which is lens specific. I’ll elaborate on individual performance in the section below, but I do want to add the caveat that (for Fuji) this is a really fantastic autofocusing lens.

The 16-55 II is equipped with LM, or a linear motor. This is the superior motor that Fuji uses, and it shows in quieter and faster performance than lenses equipped with a micro motor. This is a more reactive motor, making the 16-55 II an excellent choice if you need to keep up with moving children or other active subjects.

I found the 16-55 II to be a nice lens to use for capturing family moments over the holiday. The flexible zoom range made it easy to quickly grab shots, and the quick autofocus delivered accurately focused results.

Zooming deep into the image shows that focus is just where I want it.

Besides my own personal X-H2, I did use the 16-55 II extensively during my review of the Fujifilm X-M5, and it also focused well there even if the lens is perhaps a little big for that tiny body.

I can hear a very light whirring if I put my ear next to the lens barrel during autofocus, but it is otherwise pretty silent.

Video AF

I find video AF pretty frustrating on Fuji There tend to be more obvious steps in video pulls, the touchscreen is often unresponsive in trying to force autofocus changes, and tracking isn’t as sophisticated. I did note both some good and bad here. Video focus pulls were somewhat better than average, as the linear motor manages to avoid the obvious steps that I typically see with lenses equipped with either micromotors or STM motors. What isn’t avoided, however, is the microadjustments that inevitably take place when focus gets to the subject. There will be small adjustments where focus goes in and out, and it can be distracting.

On a positive note, focus breathing is fairly low, making focus changes feel more cinematic and less abrupt.

In the past I have avoided filming my static “talking head” portions of my YouTube video with any Fuji gear because of having focus jump around. I saw enough positive here to venture a fresh test, and was happy to find that focus stayed stable during the roughly one minute long test that I filmed.

I also tested a reactiveness sequence where I walked towards the camera and moved in and out of frame to see how the camera/lens reacted. This did not go well on X-M5, with the camera losing tracking early on and leaving me completely out of focus as I approached the camera. The X-H2 did better with the 16-55 II, tracking me fairly consistently (if not perfectly) as I moved consistently towards the camera. There’s a bit of a lag before focus is picked up if I step out of frame and then back in, but it did pick me back up. For Fuji, this is a pretty good performance.

Likewise, with my hand test (where I alternately block and then unblock the camera’s view of my face with my hand) went relatively well. Transitions from my hand to my face went fairly well, though sometimes with a bit of lag where it was as if the camera was deciding whether or not to transition focus. But when the reaction happened, there’s enough speed there to execute fairly quickly.

Bottom line is that while Fuji has work to do on the autofocus front (upgraded hardware rather than just software, I think), the Fujinon XF 16-55mm is making more of the existing hardware than any lens I can remember testing outside of the killer XF 200mm F2.

Image Quality Breakdown

I could immediately tell that, unlike the older 16-55mm lens, the new 16-55 II is designed with the ultra high resolution 40MP X-Trans sensor (similar pixel density to over 90MP on a full frame sensor) in mind. It does not get embarrassed by the high resolution sensor.

Not only does this image look great when viewed full (good color, good general contrast), but it also looks great in the details even though I’ve had to recover some of the shadowed information on Nala’s face due to the extreme backlighting.

The optical formula is 16 elements in 11 groups, with a majority of those being exotic elements, including 4 aspherical, 3 ED elements, and 1 super ED element. two of those being aspherical elements and one being an extra low dispersion element. If you look at the MTF charts, you’ll see a lens that would have been flawless on the lower resolution cameras of the past but manages to still be strong on very high resolution cameras today.

The MTF chart for the 16mm end shows very impressive center and mid-frame results, but a pretty step drop (particularly on the meridional access) near the corners. The telephoto end is equally impressive in the center and midframe and has a more linear drop to the corners.

The bottom line is that this is easily now the strongest standard zoom performer, topping my previous winner (the Sigma 18-50mm) with noticeably more contrast and significantly less fringing.

There is of course more to lens performance than pure sharpness and contrast, but it’s reassuring that the most expensive standard zoom on the platform is back to being the strongest performing lens.

So let’s jump into some of the details.

First of all, how about vignette and distortion? The lens has been downsized significantly – did that come at a price? This is one of the primary areas where I would expect that to show up.

We’ll start on the wide (16mm) end:

There’s a lot of barrel distortion here, but no more than before. I had to use a +22 to correct the barrel distortion, but, unlike the competing lenses, there isn’t any mustache pattern and the correction is very linear. What has increased (by a significant amount) is the amount of vignette. I needed a +48 to correct vignette on the first generation lens, but that amount has nearly doubled to a +91 to correct it here. It would appear that vignette is the thing that engineers had to compromise on to get the smaller size.

On the telephoto (55mm) the distortion has inverted to a pincushion distortion. It is significant, requiring a -13 to correct. Vignette is only slightly less, requiring a still very heavy +84 to correct for it. Fuji’s corrections are good, so in most situations the corrected image will look fine, but just know that when shooting in low light conditions (higher ISOs), there will be additional noise in the corners because of so much correction.

Longitudinal chromatic aberrations are extremely well controlled on either my test chart or in real world images.

There’s a huge advantage here for the Fuji lens over the Sigma 18-50mm, as that lens suffers quite badly from fringing.

Lateral chromatic aberrations show up near the edge of the frame in transitions from dark to light areas.  You can see from the edge of my test chart Fuji has also nailed this metric, and there is next to no fringing in the transitions from black to white.

The vignette and resolution performance isn’t great, but the control of chromatic aberrations is.

So how about resolution?  The 40MP Fuji X-Trans sensor tends to make all but the very sharpest of lenses look a little soft when viewed at high magnification levels, and it just so happens that my review standard is to examine results at a 200% magnification.  That is a lot to ask of any lens, and the previous generation lens just didn’t really hold up under this level of scrutiny. Can the second generation lens pass the test?  Here’s a look at the test chart that crops throughout the review come from:

And here is a look at the F2.8 crops at 16mm from the center, then mid-frame, and then extreme lower right corner:

That’s a nice strong performance, with consistently good results at all points. I also saw very good centering, with consistently good performance in all four corners.

This is about the only point where the XF 16-50mm can compare (at least in the center), as it has the same focal length and aperture, and can deliver similar levels of sharpness.

If we jump up into the upper left corner, however, we can see the superior performance of the 16-55 II.

Likewise the Sigma holds up pretty well in the center, but the corner performance is night and day.

Stopping down to F4 shows an uptick in detail and contrast. The midframe results, in particular, highlight that improvement.

I don’t see much of a change from F4-F8, with results being uniformly pretty excellent. Landscape images look great.

Because minimum aperture is F22, diffraction on a high resolution body like this is going to be more obvious. The results through F11 aren’t bad, but at F16 and F22, the softness from diffraction gets very obvious.

Moving on to 23mm (the next marked spot on the zoom ring) shows even stronger sharpness and contrast all across the frame…right into the corners.

Real world images in this range look fantastic.

Moving on to 35mm I found some give and take at F2.8. Some spots in the frame favored the 23mm test, and other spots favored the 35mm capture.

Real world images at 35mm look very good.

Finally the all important telephoto end. Comparing 55mm to 35mm shows a slight improvement at 55mm in the center.

Corners show a bit more of a drop-off (as the MTF suggested), and the 35mm result is definitely stronger looking.

I shot roughly equally at 16mm and 55mm, and I was happy with the results at both ends of the zoom range. Real world 55mm shots showed good contrast and detail.

I feel pretty comfortable in saying that this is the most consistently excellent APS-C standard zoom that I’ve tested. Sharpness is good all through that zoom range with no real weak point.

Fuji also always delivers good color in their glass, so I like the overall look of images, too. Colors are rich.

I feel like photos have more of a prime-like rendering.

The bokeh quality is fairly good for a standard zoom, though will be somewhat situational. Shots with a favorable ratio between the distance to the subject and the distance to the background look pretty good.

Geometry is pretty good. Specular highlights are rounder than some competing lenses.

If we dive a little deeper into those specular highlights, though, we can see a little more inner outlining than what I would prefer.

That means that some situations will look a little busier when that ratio isn’t as favorable.

Overall, however, I would say the bokeh is pretty decent considering A) how sharp the lens is and B) the fact that it is a zoom.

Flare resistance is also quite good. The lens is able to hold up to the bright sun through the window here, for example:

Shooting right into the sun for a landscape style shot is also no problem.

Stopping down will show a tiny bit more ghosting artifacts, but nothing concerning at all.

In general, image quality is pretty great. Fuji has delivered in producing a standard zoom that is an optical match for their high resolution cameras. You can check out the image gallery if you’d like to see more.

Conclusion

I have to confess that I was initially concerned after Fuji released their first cameras with the 40MP sensors. It seemed like most of the lenses that I put on the camera looked pretty soft…including a few new releases. But lenses like the 23mm F1.4 WR, 33mm F1.4 WR, 56mm F1.2 WR, and now this 16-55mm F2.8 II have started to set my mind at ease. These are all lenses that are clearly designed with this higher resolution sensor in mind, and they are able to shine even on this most demanding of platforms.

The 16-55 II feels like the premium lens in the class now, as it should. I still like the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8, but there’s no question that the 16-55 II outclasses it optically. It’s more consistently sharp, has better autofocus, more features, and just produces richer images.

Despite the weight loss regimen, the Fujinon XF 16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II is still the bigger and heavier than competing lenses, and its unquestionably more expensive. But it’s also unequivocally the best, and if you are going to use one of Fuji’s high resolution sensors, it is probably worth investing in. I’m certainly considering one.

Pros:

• Huge reduction in size and weight
• Finally a declick option!
• Full weather sealing and fluorine coating
• Aperture blade increase to 11
• Improved magnification
• Fast, quiet autofocus
• Focus accuracy good
• Low chromatic aberrations
• Consistently sharp throughout zoom range
• Good flare resistance
• Nice bokeh
• Great color

Cons:

• Zoom ring doesn’t move smoothly
• Heavy vignette and distortion
• Relatively expensive

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GEAR USED:

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