It’s been a long time since I’ve used a Tokina lens. I actually owned multiple Tokina wide angle zooms back in my time as a photographer before I became a reviewer. Tokina has released relatively few lenses in the mirrorless era, and I hadn’t ever really built a relationship with the company, so I actually have not done any Tokina reviews. But late in 2024 they reached out to me about the possibility of reviewing their upcoming wide angle zoom for Fuji X-mount – the Tokina ATX-M 11-18mm F2.8 – and I readily agreed to do so out of interest to see the state of their development. The E-mount version of this lens was their first wide angle zoom for mirrorless cameras, and they’ve made a few minor tweaks to the formula here to produce an even more useful zoom lens. There are some strong competitors in this segment, so does the ATX-M 11-18mm stand out in any way? Find out by watching the video review or reading on in the text review below!

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Thanks to Tokina 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 ATX-M 11-18mm here.

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A few of the basics first. This is an APS-C lens designed for mirrorless cameras only, and this review is of the Fuji X-mount version of the lens. The APS-C crop factor of Fuji’s XF cameras is 1.5, giving the ATX 11-18mm a full frame equivalent zoom range of 16.5-27mm; not dissimilar to Tamron’s 17-28mm F2.8 full frame zoom, which I reviewed here. It’s not a big range, obviously, but it does cover a lot of the key wide angle framing options, going from this at 11mm:

…to this at 18mm:

The ATX-M 11-18mm has a constant maximum aperture of F2.8, making it useful in a variety of lighting conditions.

Some of the chief competitors among other third party brands include:

• Sigma 10-18mm F2.8 DN (my review here). The Sigma has a slightly larger zoom range (1 extra millimeter on the wide end), but also has more vignette and distortion.
• The Tamron 11-20mm F2.8 RXD (my review here). The Tamron also has a slightly longer zoom range, with an extra 2mm on the long end. It has the highest MSRP ($899 USD) of the three, though it looks like Tamron may have permanently dropped the price to $659.

I quite like both of those lenses, and while Tokina isn’t quite as well known as either of those brands, the ATX-M 11-18mm does provide a credible alternative to them, with very nice image quality and great Kenko optical glass colors.

And, while the initial MSRP for the lens is $599 USD, the E-mount version is currently retailing for considerably less and undercuts both the Tamron and Sigma in price. Sound interesting? Let’s take a closer look.

Tokina 11-18mm F2.8 Build and Handling

The Tokina lenses that I owned back in the day had a very dated look (by modern standards), but I’m actually very partial to the design language of the ATX-M 11-18mm, which looks both modern and premium.

The lens features a lightly flocked barrel made of metal and engineered plastic components. Both the zoom and focus rings have tight ribs and a flush rather than raised design. There are arguments to be made that a raised ring may have better ergonomics, but I would say that aesthetically this design looks very clean to me. The build quality feels a bit more upscale than the Tamron and more akin to the Sigma. One negative aspect of the tighter ribbing is that it isn’t unusual to find a bit of dust and lint caught in the ribs. I noticed that even in the product photos from reviews of the Sony E-mount version of the lens.

Not a big deal, but an observation nonetheless.

One unusual design choice is that the lens hood has a somewhat rough texture on the outside but is smooth inside, which is pretty much opposite of most designs.

You can see that the hood itself is quite large, and it definitely adds to the overall size of the lens. While it doesn’t have a lock on it, it does click into place very definitely and stays well locked into place.

A design element here that I do prefer is that while the Sigma and Tamron lenses have a section that extends forward slightly while zooming (that the lens hood is attached to), the Tokina has a very slight extension of the inner barrel which doesn’t affect the area of the lens barrel where the hood bayonets on.

That inner barrel extension is longest at 11mm and fully retracted at 18mm:

But what I like is that if you have the lens hood in place (as I typically do), then that little bit of extension happens within the confines of the lens hood, and the physical dimensions of the lens do not change. From the outside the lens’ length looks the same at all times, and because the lens hood isn’t moving in and out, it also means that the lens will maintain a more consistent balance (important if you were using it on a gimbal, for example).

The Tokina ATX-M 11-18mm F2.8 falls in between the Sigma and Tamron lenses in size. It is 74.4mm (2.9″) in both diameter and length, making it very slightly wider than the other two lenses but 10mm longer than the Sigma and 12mm shorter than the Tamron. The weight is 320g (11.28oz), making it a fair bit heavier than the Sigma (+70g) but slightly lighter (-15g) than the Tamron.

There are obviously smaller and lighter choices like the Sigma, but this is still a very lightweight and portable lens that I found very easy to bring along. It is definitely lighter than the average for the class, though, to be fair, it also has the smallest zoom range.

The zoom ring has each focal length marked. Competing lenses go by twos or skip certain focal lengths. The Tokina has a smaller zoom range, obviously, so there is room for all 8 options to be marked. The zoom ring itself is excellent. It zooms very smoothly and almost feels like an internally zooming lens.

The weight/damping of the manual focus ring is a bit light, but, more importantly, there is very little focus throw. I found it hard to focus outside of a meter, as there is only a few degrees of rotation between one meter and infinity. Let’s just say that this works much better as an autofocus lens!

Up front we have a 67mm front filter thread, which appears to be the standard for these type lenses (all three have a 67mm front filter thread).

At the back of the lens we find one key upgrade over the E-mount version: there is now a weather sealing gasket! While Tokina doesn’t mention other internal seals, the addition of the gasket at the lens mount helps a lot. The Sigma is similar with just a mount gasket, but the Tamron and Fuji 10-24mm WR both have more thorough weather sealing with internal seals as well.

We also find a USB port for firmware updates located on the lens mount, which I always appreciate. For some reason they elected to go with the older micro-USB standard (USB-B) rather than the now ubiquitous USB-C port I’m finding on essentially all modern lenses so equipped.

Nonetheless, I’m very happy the port is there to help to keep the lens future proofed.

Tokina is a Japanese company whose products are built in Japan, which isn’t always the case these days.

The lens does not have optical stabilization built in, which is also true for the F2.8 competitors as well at the moment. It does have proper communication to the camera and Tokina claims full compatibility with such Fuji features as image stabilization (if your camera is so equipped), MF assist, and optical corrections including vignette, chromatic aberrations, and distortion.

The minimum focus distances varies depending on whether you are shooting on the wide end (19cm) or telephoto end (30cm). The higher magnification comes on the wide end, though you have to be very close to your subject to achieve it. Tokina cites a very low 0.08x on the telephoto end and a slightly better 0.11x on the wide end.

Here’s what that looks like out in the real world, and also gives you an idea of the kind of background blur you can achieve (not much!)

This is one area where the competing lenses are all superior.

The addition of the weather sealing gasket is a real boon here, and I really liked the handling of the Tokina ATX-M 11-18mm F2.8 X. It was fun to use and presented no complications to me out in the field. I would have liked a better close focus performance, but that’s not really what I buy wide angle lenses for anyway.

Autofocus for Stills

The Tokina ATX-M 11-18mm is equipped with an STM focus motor. I’m always a little concerned when testing third party lenses (and sometimes first party lenses!) on Fuji, as their autofocus system is less sophisticated (at the present) than competing brands. Fortunately the ATX-M 11-18mm survives the porting to Fuji very nicely. The speed of the focus motor is quick and confident, with near immediate transitions from foreground to background subjects.

Wide angle lenses are not the best for eye tracking, as often the eye doesn’t occupy a large enough portion of the frame to track unless you are close to the subject, but when I was close enough, the green box locked onto the eye and tracked fine.

But eye tracking is less necessary when the subject is a bit further away, as pretty much everything will be in focus at that point with a wide angle lens.

I shot the photo below of snowmobilers zipping by, but it wasn’t difficult to nail focus because so much was in focus.

There is basically no focus sound even with my ear near the barrel, though there will be a light clicking if you let on and off the shutter as the aperture blades open and close.

One other important thing is that the lens focused well even when stopped down to landscape apertures, with no hunting or pulsing. That was true even when shooting into a strongly backlit scene.

In short, I was very pleasantly surprised by the autofocus performance for stills. Focus was quick, quiet, and confident, leaving me nothing really to complain about…so I won’t.

Video Autofocus

The video side of things was also quite good. This tends to be the weakest link in the Fuji autofocus chain, and I did see a few of the typical “Fuji quirks”, but they were rather muted. Focus pulls were generally very good, with no visible steps in the main pull, though I did see a final adjustment after the focus area was reached. It’s as if the Fuji focus algorithms tend to second guess themselves. It was relatively minor, however, and far less than what I’ve seen on many other lenses. I would say that this test was mostly similar to what I saw from the Sigma 10-18 and better than what I saw from the Tamron 11-20mm.

There is a bit of focus breathing, but nothing severe.

My “hand test” where I alternately block the camera’s view of my face with my hand and then remove it went mostly well. The lens successfully transferred focus from my hand to my eye and back, though those focus pulls weren’t remarkably well damped, so they felt very slightly abrupt.

Real world focus transitions seemed fine, and one big deal to me is that I didn’t see any focus slipping and readjusting as I zoomed in and out. Some lenses (the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8, for example) are guilty of a lot of warping and focus adjustments while zooming, but that’s not the case here.

Focus was stable in static shots as well. I did notice a bit more shaking in my footage, but that could be because it has been incredibly cold this winter and I may just be shaking a bit more!

Image Quality Breakdown

The optical formula is 13 elements in 11 groups with 4 of those elements being special elements (2 SD elements and two different types of aspherical lenses). The MTF shows a very sharp center, extremely good mid-frame, and softer corners at F2.8 and 11mm, while 18mm shows a fairly steady slide from center to corners and a slightly less sharp performance all around.

I’m always a little concerned when testing zoom lenses on the X-H2, as the 40MP sensor on cameras like my Fujifilm X-H2 is the most demanding platform that I test on. It has the pixel density equivalence of more than 90MP on full frame, which of course doesn’t exist at the time of this review. It tends to really, really punish any optical weaknesses. I did see some of that at 18mm (particularly at wider apertures), but I’m happy to report that in general I found real world sharpness to be very good.

I felt like the real world “bite” of images was good, which is really important in a wide angle zoom where a lot will be in focus and you want the details to look crisp.

Wide angle lenses rarely have an issue with LoCA (longitudinal chromatic aberrations) as depth of field is fairly large, and that is the case here. I see mostly neutral results on either side of the plane of focus without any fringing.

Far more common in wide lenses is LaCA (lateral chromatic aberrations), and frankly I really dislike them because they tend to make corners look more mushy and less clean. That proves to be another area of strength, however, with little evidence of fringing around the black and white transitions.

I can turn off corrections and still find the edges of the frame unaffected by LaCA in real world shots.

The Sigma is really rough in the distortion and vignette department on the wide end, with very strong amounts of barrel distortion and enough vignette to require maxing out the sliders. Both the Tokina and Tamron fare better by not attempting to go as wide, and both of them show a much milder amount of distortion at 11mm.

I used a +9 to correct for the mild barrel distortion, and it corrected fairly cleanly even with a manual correction. Vignette was still pretty heavy, however, requiring a +85 to manually correct.

The telephoto end features much milder vignette and distortion, with a touch of pincushion distortion (-4 to correct) and much less vignette (+54 to correct).

As noted, these figures are close to what we saw on the Tamron, but the ATX-M 11-18mm definitely outperforms the Sigma in these areas.

So now the crucial look at resolution and contrast. The lens performed fairly well in the reviews I’ve seen on the lower resolution Sony APS-C sensor, but this high resolution Fuji sensor is a completely different challenge.  This test has been done on a 40MP X-H2 sensor.  I use a high end tripod and two second camera delay to ensure vibration doesn’t affect images.  Here’s a look at the test chart that we will examine at high magnification:

If we take a look at 11mm crops (at 200%) at F2.8 from the center, mid-frame, and lower right corner, we find that as the MTF suggested the center is excellent, the mid-frame is good, and the corners are fairly good except for the last little bit.

Contrast is noticeably improved when stopped down to F4:

By F5.6 the corners are looking quite good.

In general I found that real world landscape images were nicely sharp in the center and mid-frame, but the corner sharpness was unimpressive to me.

In this case I actually found that stepping on down to F8 and even F11 in real world images were worthwhile in getting even sharpness, though I didn’t necessarily didn’t feel the same when just viewing my chart.

Landscapes at smaller apertures look pretty consistently great at F8 (F9 here).

Diffraction on a very high resolution body comes early and hits hard. By F11 you’ll start to see some softening, but that becomes painfully obvious at F16 and F22. Physics definitely affects smaller apertures on a high resolution body, as you can see here:

My recommendation is to avoid F16 and smaller apertures regardless of the lens you are using on a 40MP APS-C sensor.

I went back and compared my 11mm F5.6 results from the Tokina with the 10mm F5.6 results from the Sigma 10-18mm. I honestly could not really call a winner. They were very close all across the frame. That’s great for the Tokina, as I think the Sigma is a very strong lens.

Moving on to the middle of the zoom range brings a more consistent sharpness across the frame, starting in the middle:

There’s an even more noticeable difference in the corners.

Landscape images at 14mm look nice and crisp. No real complaints there.

Before moving on to 18mm, I do want to give some perspective for those using the lower resolution 26MP sensor. There are advantages to the higher resolution sensor, but one potential downside is that it makes lenses like this look at a little softer…at least at a pixel level. If I downscale one of these images to the 6244 x 4163 pixel resolution of the 26MP sensor, sharpness and contrast at 1:1 pixel level appears higher. This gives you an idea of performance on your camera.

Moving on to 18mm we will find some optical regression which is more pronounced wide open. The center looks softer than what we saw at the peak of 14mm:

The falloff in the corners is more pronounced.

The good news is that there is a much more dramatic improvement when stopping down. F4 and then F5.6 all look considerably sharper. Here, for example, we can see a significant improvement from F2.8 to F5.6 in the mid-frame.

F8 looks quite good across the frame, though corners are good, not great. I would recommend shooting at smaller apertures if you want consistent sharpness across the frame.

When shooting at F2.8 but composing in the center, the results look good.

My conclusion is that 18mm is the weakest part of the zoom range, but it’s not terrible. I went back and compared to my results from the Sigma 10-18mm and found that (at 18mm) the Tokina was sharper in the center but the Sigma was sharper everywhere else at F2.8. With both lenses stopped down to F5.6, the results are largely similar across the frame.

In short, sharpness is competitiveness with the other main players in this class, so no complaints there.

Bokeh is not really going to be a significant asset here. There are essentially three paths to creating strong defocus (four, if you include tilt!). Those are A) long focal length B) fast maximum aperture or C) close focus abilities. The closest the ATX-M 11-18mm comes is in the “fast maximum aperture” category, and frankly F2.8 on APS-C isn’t particularly fast…particularly when coupled with wide angle focal lengths. I’ve demonstrated peak bokeh earlier in the review, but here’s a more typical shot that shows that even with the background being distant it still isn’t strongly blurred out.

I didn’t see anything objectionable about the bokeh; I just didn’t see much of it!

I was generally satisfied with flare resistance…particularly on the wide end. When shooting at F2.8, the flare resistance at 11mm is solid, but 18mm shows more general ghosting and some loss of contrast.

When you stop the lens down at either position, the results are generally more favorable, with deep contrast, though 18mm still shows more ghosting artifacts.

Most often you’ll be shooting between those two extremes in terms of aperture, however, and in real world shots I generally found that I could compose with impunity and get good results.

I always like to test wide angle lenses for coma if possible and to see how they’ll handle something like astrophotography. I mostly saw good results here, with a little elongating of the star points near the edge of the frame (image 3 below), but no “wings” growing out of them.

Generally this was a solid optical performance, with no fatal flaws. I was obviously shooting in cold, winter conditions (not the most colorful season!), but I found that color saturation and color tone were still very nice. Images had a certain pristine quality that appealed to me.

I wouldn’t say that the Tokina ATX-M is necessarily optically better than either the Tamron or the Sigma, as there is definitely give and take between the three lenses. The Tokina does have lower amounts of distortion and vignette than the Sigma, so that’s one key advantage. In short, however, if you choose the Tokina you can be assured that you are choosing a lens that performs among the very best in the class. You can see more images in the gallery here.

Conclusion

Good wide angle zooms are invaluable lenses, allowing you to get a very wide perspective for shooting landscapes, interiors, and even the night sky. The Tokina ATX-M 11-18mm F2.8 is a great addition to Fuji X-mount lineup, giving a third reasonably priced alternative to premium options like the Fujinon XF 8-16mm F2.8 ($1500!) or the XF 10-24mm F4 OIS ($1000). Fuji doesn’t have a native wide angle zoom with a constant F2.8 aperture under $1000, and so that opens up a huge lane for lenses like the ATX-M 11-18mm, which goes plenty wide for most people.

The Tokina was a great match for going out and capturing winter landscapes, with a weather sealing gasket and a tough build quality that never faltered in the -20 conditions.

I’ve liked images that I’ve gotten with the lens and look forward to shooting in future seasons that are a bit less bleak. It was easy to shoot with in the field, and I particularly appreciate that fact that all zoom extension takes place behind the hood, allowing the lens to practically behave more like an internally zooming lens. Some Fuji shooters may be put off by the lack of an aperture ring, but is that ring worth spending an additional $400-900? I suspect the answer is no, and since none of the other third party wide angle zooms have an aperture ring either, Tokina is probably on safe ground here. The biggest disadvantage for the ATX-M 11-18mm F2.8 is that it has the smallest zoom range of the competing lenses, but it does compensate with nice build, excellent autofocus performance, and very good optical performance…even on the demanding Fuji 40MP sensor. All in all, the Tokina ATX-M 11-18mm F2.8 X is well worth considering if you’re looking for a wide angle zoom for your Fuji camera.

Pros:

• Nice physical design
• The addition of a weather sealing gasket for X-mount
• Very smooth zoom action
• Zoom extension happens behind hood
• USB port for firmware updates
• Smooth, fast autofocus
• Fairly good video AF performance
• Low distortion
• Low chromatic aberrations
• Good wide open sharpness throughout much of the range
• Excellent color
• Decent flare resistance
• Good coma performance
• Priced well below 1st party Fuji competitors

Cons:

• Manual focus ring lacks precision
• Softer at 18mm

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GEAR USED:

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