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Fujinon XF 16-50mm F2.8-4.8 R LM WR Review | The Best Kit Lens?
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Feb 3, 2025
Photographer Dustin Abbott shares a deep dive review of Fuji's new kit lens - the XF 16-50mm F2.8-4.8 R LM WR II Is it a good upgrade from the XF 18-55mm? | Read the Text Review: | Visit the Image Gallery | Purchase the Fuji 16-50mm WR @ B&H Photo https://bhpho.to/40ADTph | Adorama https://howl.link/6cmasm9u3ox4h | Amazon https://amzn.to/4hiNWox | Camera Canada https://shrsl.com/4tcm9 | Amazon Canada https://amzn.to/3PCnzOv | Amazon UK https://amzn.to/3Wn7Vuj | Amazon Germany https://amzn.to/3Wox1ZL Check out the DA Merch here: https://bit.ly/TWIMerch | Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/dustinabbott | On the Web: http://dustinabbott.net/ | Sign up for my Newsletter: http://bit.ly/1RHvUNp | Instagram: http://bit.ly/DLAinsta | Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1nuUUeH | Flickr: http://bit.ly/1UcnC0B | 500px: http://bit.ly/1Sy2Ngu Follow Craig @ https://www.instagram.com/craigstoffersen/ Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo: http://bhpho.to/1TA0Xge Adorama: https://howl.link/nt4zdz1goa7ql Camera Canada: http://bit.ly/DLACameraCan Sony Canada: https://www.thesonyshop.ca/?ref=abbott Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HrY64d Amazon Canada: https://amzn.to/3qG1p18 Ebay: http://bit.ly/DustineBay Into the AM Clothing: https://bit.ly/intotheAMda and use code DUSTIN10 for 10% off Fioboc Clothing: https://tinyurl.com/FiobocDA20 and us code DUSTIN20 for 20% off Make a donation via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/dustinTWI ============================= Table of Contents: ============================= 0:00 - Intro and Concept
View Video Transcript
0:00
[Music]
0:06
[Music] hi I'm Dustin abot and I'm here today to
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give you my review of the new Fuji 16-50 mm f2.8 to 4.8 this is an R
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lmw lens I recently reviewed the 16 to 55 mm Mark 2 lens from Fuji which is
0:27
their premium standard zoom and that's however not the only new zoom lens that
0:32
comes from Fuji recently the cult favorite was the xf8 to 55 mm f2.8 to F4
0:40
ois and it finally has a replacement in the form of this new lens I found when I
0:47
did my three-way comparison last year in 2024 I compared the 18 to 50
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mm or 18 to 55 millimet I should say along with the 16 to 55 MIM and then the
1:00
Sigma uh 18 to 50 mm and what I found at that point is that the two existing and
1:05
aging about a decade old plus uh Fuji lenses had fallen behind in terms of
1:11
their competitiveness and particularly their ability to resolve the very high 40 megapixel resolution sensors that are
1:17
in some of Fuji's current cameras of course when they were designed they were designed for sensors that averaged or
1:23
that were 16 megapixels at the time there was no third- party competition and so the market has obviously changed
1:29
through both factors of Fuji themselves and then of course external factors coming in so I found that those lenses
1:36
were definitely in need of an update and obviously Fuji felt the same so this new
1:41
lens obviously um is a replacement for the 18 to 55 millimeter that lens has
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been discontinued and the new XF 16 to 50 mm that I'm reviewing today will be
1:52
the new kit lens for certain mid-range uh Fuji cameras moving ahead now when I
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reviewed the 16 to 55 MIM Mark I it was in my opinion just a a clear step in the
2:04
right direction in basically almost every category with very very little exception I expect the reaction to the
2:10
new 16 to 50 mm to be a little bit more mixed however so there are some obvious
2:15
pluses relative to the lens that it replaces this lens is now weather sealed that's huge it has a wider angle of view
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going as wide as 16 millim rather than 18 mm it is an internally zooming lens
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that could be a huge Factor particularly for for those wanting to use it on a gimbal it has newer autofocus Tech and
2:34
thus focuses better it has a better Optical performance more optimized for the higher resolution sensor it also has
2:41
much higher magnification levels and is capable of focusing more closely all of those I think are probably unmitigated
2:47
pluses in most people's minds however there are some potential negatives and these could be big ones for certain
2:53
people this lens no longer has Optical image stabilization so no lens based
2:58
stabilization it's going to have to rely high on in camera stabilization just like the 16 to 55 mm it has an actually
3:05
shorter Zoom range while it goes to millimet wider on the wide end it's 5 millim shorter on the telephoto end so
3:12
that could be a factor for some people unfortunately it has a slower maximum aperture while the old lens was f2.8 to
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F4 this new one is f2.8 to F 4.8 so it doesn't go as far on the telephoto end
3:25
and even when you hit 50 mm it's at a penalty of about a half stop of light
3:30
Gathering and of course there's always the sigma that exists now and that Sigma
3:36
has you know maybe not as compelling a a zoom range but it has a constant maximum
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apture and it potentially costs less and so that means that there are going to be those that have a little bit more
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difficult decision particularly if they're looking at the upgrade path or if they're not buying a lens in kit so
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if you don't speak Fuji let me break that down briefly R in the name refers to an aperture ring does have an apture
4:00
ring a little complicated we'll get to that in just a moment it has LM stands for linear motor so that's the focus
4:06
system and WRR stands for the fact that we now have weather resistance now as
4:11
far as the price of the now three available options at this point the sigma as far as MSRP is the cheapest
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$549 and of course because it's been out for a while it goes on sale and so it's been in recent uh history it's been
4:25
available for about 489 and so obviously the price is going to vary some and obviously change according to your
4:30
Market the MSRP at least in the US for the 16 to 50 mm is
4:35
699 that's with a big asterisk however because you can get it for as little as $400 additional dollars when purchased
4:42
in kit with a new camera and then of course the most expensive is the premium 16 to 55 mm Mark I and it's going to run
4:49
you about $1,200 so let's dive a little bit closer into the build and handling here one
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thing that stood out to me when I was doing some comparison tests and I will be doing a true Deep dive comparison
5:01
review is uh between all three of these lenses is that this lens is actually the widest and it's wider than the 16 to 55
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MIM even with both lenses you know on a tripod identical distance both set at 16
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mm you can see that the 16 to 50 mm frames a little bit wider so that's great uh it is internally zooming and as
5:22
already noted and that's really a big deal because it means that if you're on a gimbal means that you're not going to
5:27
change the balance at all also means that it zooms nicely and furthermore it
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means that uh that helps with the weather ceiling because there's nothing that's moving in and out and so there's no pumping or suction that might bring
5:40
some dust into the lens itself and so uh and as far as the zoom action this is
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definitely the nicest zooming of the three and that really becomes relevant in video I found the uh 16 to 55 mm
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actually somewhat hard to zoom smoothly because uh the resistance changes about
5:58
2third of the way through the Zoom range it's tighter at the uh telephoto in and thus all of a you're kind of if you're
6:04
trying to move move along at a consistent kind of pace you'll hit a certain spot where you either stick or
6:10
you have to slow down because it requires more resistance so definitely prefer this here I love the fact that it
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is weather sealed and obviously again the internal zooming is going to help with that the lens is roughly the same
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size as the lens at replaces within about a millimeter it's 65 mm in diameter 71.4 mm in length that's 2.6 in
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by 2.8 in however they have managed to reduce the weight significantly about 70
6:36
G it weighs in just 240 G or 8 O and so that is obviously huge if you're wanting
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to travel light front filter threads are 58 mm here now I mentioned that the
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there's an apture ring but that comes with a bit of an asterisk and that is because because this is a very variable
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aperture Zoom there are no set or marked positions for aperture and so you know
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while the aperture ring will rotate and function fine it rotates endlessly so there's no hard stop to run into
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furthermore because there's no markings here it means that you're going to have to be looking at a screen or a
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viewfinder to determine what the set aperture value is anyway and so if
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you're in that position already is it going to be easier to actually change aperture through the command dial as
7:23
opposed to an aperture ring well I mean that's a question for you to determine but I will say that I feel like the
7:29
apture Rings just not as functional I certainly didn't enjoy it as much because I couldn't look down and see
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what apture I was at by looking at the ring itself there is a switch here that is by the aperture ring and that allows
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you to choose between two options either to access the manual aperture ring and to use that or you can switch it into a
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mode where a control switched to the camera and a command dial to control aperture instead and and so the aperture
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itself um as noted it's variable aperture so does start at 2.8 but it
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doesn't even hardly make it to 17 mm before the aperture already starts
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closing and so you really don't even get a full extra millimeter of Zoom before the aperture starts to change uh it will
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change an incremental stops and so as far as the marked positions by the time you get to 23 millim maximum apture is f
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3.3 by the time you get to 35 millim the next marked position on the zoom range it is at F 3.9 and obviously at 50 mm it
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is going to be F4 4.8 which is a half stop slower than what F4 was to give you
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an idea of how that plays out in the real world when I was shooting my test chart under identical lighting conditions and shooting at the same time
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when I was shooting with the sigma at f2.8 I got a shutter speed of 1 150th of
8:49
a second in identical conditions shooting with the Fuji lens at F 4.8 I
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got 150th the second which means you're going to need a lot of additional light to compensate for that slower maximum
9:01
apture and of course that is offset by the fact that we no longer have the ois to compensate for that and so to kind of
9:09
mitigate that factor uh Fuji is only selling this lens in a kit with right
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now three cameras that's the xt50 the xt5 and the xs20 obviously there will be
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future models that will be added to that list but one thing I noted is that all of them are lenses that have ody image
9:25
stabilization and that's their way of kind of working around that and that's fine if you're buying an ink kit with
9:30
those particular cameras it does work fine for example my xh2 in terms of getting stabilization from the camera
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itself however if you are looking at an upgrade path for example you currently
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own the 18 to 55 mm you know if you have a camera that doesn't have inbody image
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stabilization you might be tempted to say you know what I'm going to stick with what I have you know or you know the most recent camera from Fuji I've
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tested the xm5 no ody image stabilization so I mean buying this lens
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means that all of a sudden you are you don't have that stabilization and that could potentially be a factor for you
10:06
and so I I think that that may be a misstep by Fuji and of course time will tell as far as the market goes there are
10:13
no switches other than that aperture switch that I told you about no buttons on the exterior you have free Rings you
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have that apture ring you have the zoom ring and then up front you have a manual focus ring now the manual focus ring I
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like at least relative to the manual focus ring on the 16 to 55 mm Mark 2 I
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feel like it is a little better damped and has slightly better feel however with any of these lenses my complaint
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because of the nature of Fuji's autofocus and thus manual focus is that focus is not like this linear smooth
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progression it's like you you focus in little chunks and so it moves forward in bits it doesn't move forward in this
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kind of smooth fashion particularly when you're trying to get Precision Focus I just don't really enjoy the focus action
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at all of course your mileage may vary on that uh while they moved up to 11
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aperture blades in the 16 to 55 in the 16 to 50 mm they've kept it at nine
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aperture blades and so if that's a factor for you fine it's probably not a big deal one thing that they have
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definitely improved is whereas minimum Focus distance was 30 cm before they've dropped that to 24 cm and whereas
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magnification was quite low before now you can get as high as 0.30 times and
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that's on apsc so when you apply the crop factor that plays out to the equivalent of about 1 to two or half
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life size on fullframe equivalency which means you're going to be able to fill the frame very well using this lens high
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level of magnification and and so that's great however at least on the copy I tested I
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found that contrast wasn't fantastic and that was particularly true when up close and so I didn't feel like the up close
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image quality was really fantastic uh when shooting you know at uh F 4.8 so
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you're going to have to stop bound further which you know comes with other potential complications and so I would
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have liked a little bit better performance on the telephoto in maybe it's copy specific but we certainly
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wouldn't wouldn't want that to be the trend either so how about autofocus in this case we'll talk about Stills first
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of all now both of these lenses both this lens and the lens that it replaced technically had linear a linear motor
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Focus system but obviously we're talking about much newer technology and in you know in previous comparisons the sigma
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was the better focusing of the linear motor equipped Fuji lindes that's no longer the case and so uh this is
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definitely an improved linear Focus motor it's smoother it's quieter it's faster in operation showed good eye
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detection uh for example in this this shot of Ferrari you can see it nailed
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Focus not just in the eye area but right on the iris it's perfectly where it should be and so definitely good in that
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regard the only thing that I'll complain about as far as Stills autofocus is that did run into the instance fairly often
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and if I was trying to focus on a close subject even if the focus box was right on that subject sometimes Focus was just
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St stuck on the background like as you can see here and I had to kind of manipulate it to get it to where I
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wanted it to be and then you can see here that it would focus correctly I would say in general that Fuji's camera
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autofocus it's making progress but it's still clunky compared to all the other platforms that I test on you can tell
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however that this lens is one of the best better ones when it comes to autofocus on Fuji how about for video um
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on the the bad of things and this is kind of just general observations I found that you know there's typical Fuji
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things sometimes when you touch to change focus on the screen when I'm trying to do video Focus pulls the
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touchcreen just sometimes just isn't reactive or it's slow to respond there is sometimes some extra micro
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adjustments where it doesn't quite lock and stay there confidently on the positive however the focus pulls test
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that I did was really about as good as what I've seen on Fuji there was you know good pull from one subject to
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another less even of the micro adjustments and what I saw with the 60 16 to 55 and so that was definitely a
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positive on that front my negative is for the lens itself is that I found
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relative to doing some direct competitions you know comparisons across these that the reactiveness of this lens
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in video mode is not fantastic and so there's definitely some lag if you're walking towards the camera spots where
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focus is just behind and then it's a little bit slow to pick up if I'm kind of moving in or out of focus you know as
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I duck in and out here you can see that there's some lag it's not like it just stays right with me and so you know it's
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it's still a bit far from purpose or perfect when it comes to that and finally when I did my hand test which
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does res you know require some reactiveness because it's you know going from one subject to another subject and
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back and forth I just found that by the time that the lens camera started to react to the focus change be it the
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addition of my hand or the removal of my hand by the time it picked up on that I was pretty much ready to go to the next
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action and so it just focus just wasn't quite where I wanted uh in general and so I would say that focus is definitely
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improved I would say it's better than the sigma you know in this some of the parts but it's definitely not as good as
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the 1655 Mark I so how about image quality now I'm going to give you a quick overview here and then there's a
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deep dive for those of you that like getting into all the details that will come at the end of the video I would say
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that this lens in my opinion is not as consistently excellent as the 16 to 55
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Mark I but it definitely has improved over the 18 to 55 uh it is best in the
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middle of the zoom range you know 23 to 30 well BBE really to to 40 millimeters
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probably 20 to 40 millimeters is kind of The Sweet Spot for the best performance that I found Optical design is 11
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elements and nine groups that includes three aspherical elements and three extra low dispersion elements MTF in
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this case my findings were not wholly consistent with the MTF chart the MTF
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shows good Center and mid-frame on the wide end but a big disparity between the
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two different axises that are shown on that and shows much weaker Corners than
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what I necessarily saw in my actual real test telephoto appears to be better in
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contrast and a more linear response but again I actually found lower contrast on the telephoto in of the uh the
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particular copy that I tested and so um you know obviously your mileage may vary a bit it was just a little bit more of a
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kind of a separation between what I saw on paper and that's what I expected to what I saw in reality now one thing that
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is a positive here it definitely has lower fringing than what the sigma does so less color fringing that's good in
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general it didn't have as good a contrast as a 16 55 Mark I as you can see here there are some definite pluses
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for this particular lens however it is the best performer when it comes to Distortion and particularly for vignette
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um it still has a fair amount of barrel distortion on the wide end a plus 21 to correct but uh vignet is only a plus 44
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which is about half what I saw on the 16 to 55 Mark I on the telephoto end it has
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the least amount of distortion only a minus four to correct just a little bit of pen cushion Distortion and vignette
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was only a plus2 correct so definitely by far the lowest amount of vignette
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overall as noted I I found in general well not as good as the 16 to 55 that
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overall the fringing was pretty well controlled for longitudinal style chromatic aberration and some real world
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shots I did see a bit more of the lateral chromatic aberration fringing along the edges of the frame than what I
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expected as you can see here in this winter shot of forest with some bare tree
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trunks I found at 16 millimet when I started to evaluate sharpness and contrast that at f2.8 pretty good in the
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center and also in the mid-frame definitely weaker in the corners and weaker relative to the 16 to 55 mm
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though better than the sigma on the wide end in the corners I saw uh that the
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center and the mid-frame improved at F4 and then at f5.6 through f8 but the
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corners at 16 mm never really sharpened up and so that does unfortunately give it a little bit of a hit when it comes
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to use as a uh landscape type of lens and that it never got to the consistent
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levels of sharpness that I was able to achieve with the 16 to 55 mm with any of
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these lenses on a high resolution sensor at f11 you'll start to see some
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softening due to defraction but it becomes much more obvious at F-16 and then in particular at F22 which is
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minimum aperture as I moved on in the zoom range to 23 mm I saw a better
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performance just much more consistent across the frame not better looking corners but also just a little bit
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better everywhere else and so if you're shooting a landscape if you have enough room to to just zoom in a little bit you
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probably going to get better results uh at 50 millimet excuse me at 35 millimet 35 millimet stays pretty consistently
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good I found that but both 23 millim and 35 millim there isn't a lot of gain when
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you stop The Lens down so you're pretty much you might get a very minor game but you're mostly going to get what you're
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going to get as far as performance pretty much wide open at that which you know the positive side of that is of
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course it's a variable aperture Zoom so it's you're already losing aperture losing light anyway so not needing to
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stop the lenss down to achieve maximum performance is probably a positive thing at 50 mm I saw pretty even performance
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across the frame but what I did find is lower contrast Corners look pretty good
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here that and the sigma are actually better than the 16 to 55 on the telephoto in in the center but the 16 to
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55 is noticeably better in the center and even into the mid-frame there and so
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again Lower contrast and stopping it down makes some improvement but never gets it fantastically sharp how about
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bouqu quality I actually think that the quality of the bouquet is not bad the geometry isn't too bad but the problem
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is is because by the telephoto end the place where you're most likely to be able to produce bokeh defocus
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backgrounds the aperture is closing to F 4.8 so it's not particularly fast you know 50 mm and F 4.8 is not a
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combination that's designed to really defocus a background so the quantity of bouquet you're going to be able to get
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is pretty low unless you're right on top of your subject and then the quality of the blur is relatively good but again
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it's it's not necessarily a strength of this lens definitely relative to the others because it can produce so little
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bokeh by comparison Fuji's Optical glass is great that continues to be the case
20:52
here colors look very good I'm happy with that I'm happy with the jpegs you can produce sometimes that's kind of the
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best of of the world in Fuji cameras because it you know does a pretty good
21:04
job there's a lot of options for tweaking jpegs in camera it does a better job of sharpening than what you
21:09
can sometimes do to Raw images so I I think the jpegs look pretty good using the lens I also found that flare
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resistance was pretty strong and that I really wasn't able to introduce much in terms of flare artifacts so positives
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there my conclusion is is that this lens is a little complicated the XF 16 to 50
21:29
millimet it's kind of this mix of steps forward and then steps backwards and the lack of ois I think is going to make a
21:36
lot of people hesitate to upgrade to it if they already own the 18 to 55 MIM if
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you are paying full MSRP nearly $700 the sigma is going to look pretty attractive
21:48
because it it it's a nice lens it performs well it's compact you know similarly compact in lightweight but it
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has that constant maximum apture of f2.8 and so I think that that's that's a
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complicating factor for this particular lens if you're buying it in a kit obviously it makes much more sense
22:05
that's a $300 price reduction and that makes it make a whole lot more sense and I think that's probably where the bulk
22:12
of the sales are going to come from it's not a Flawless lens that we have seen but I will I will give it this I would
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say of any of the apsc kit lenses that I've tested this is the nicest one that I've used so far and there's some things
22:25
that I've criticized but overall it is a lens that can produce beautiful images and you know is relatively High
22:31
performing in a lot of different levels and so again I would recommend it most as a kit lens if you are just buying it
22:39
out right I think you've got a difficult decision ahead of you because they're definitely favors Pro and against that
22:46
lens moving ahead now if you want a deeper look at the overall performance you can either take a look at my text
22:52
review that is linked in the description down below there's also an image gallery if you want to look at photos buying links if you want a Pur
22:59
but also if you want a deeper dive into the optical performance stay tuned with me right now we're going to jump into it together okay we're going to start by
23:05
taking a look at this Zoom range and so obviously this is usefully wide and it
23:11
goes into a useful amount of telephoto now some are going to lement the loss of the 5 mm on the telephoto in which is
23:18
fair I will say this if you're shooting in a high resolution body it's much easier to crop in that 5 mm to compare
23:25
to the 55 mm and as we're going to see in just a moment it's a whole lot harder to go wider in a particular space so
23:32
case in point this is the 18 mm of the sigma which is the same as what the 18 to 55 would have been and you can see
23:38
looking at this that there are things that are just that are in the frame here that just don't exist here look over in
23:44
this space over here you can see off into the you know kind of a hallway there you basically see almost none of
23:50
that in the framing over here so being able to get that extra width here is
23:56
really really quite useful now what's interesting is that technically the new 16 to 55 mm it has the same width it's
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they're both 16 mm but you can see that the 16 to 50 is noticeably wider in this area by comparison but also if we look
24:12
over here there's definitely much more space on this edge of the frame than what there is in the 16 to 55 Mark I and
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so we're definitely getting the widest angle of view from any of these zoom lenses with the 16 to 50 so taking a
24:24
look at the wide end of vignette and Distortion now obviously that's not a great result but surprisingly it is
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actually the best of the three options available at this point all of them suffer from a lot of barrel Distortion I
24:38
do give a little bit of a win to the 16 to 55 that even though it actually has one more degree of Correction so this is
24:44
a plus 21 I needed a plus 22 on the 16 to 55 but here on the 16 to 50 you can
24:51
see that there's a little bit of a mustache pattern that remains whereas the 16 to 55 Mark I has a more linear a
24:57
better correction pattern but where this lens has the clear wind is when it comes to the amount of vignette we've got a
25:03
plus 44 here which is half what I needed to correct on the 1655 and really half
25:09
what I needed on the sigma as well the 16 to 50 is also the clear winner on the telephoto end as far as vignette and
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Distortion a very mild amount of pincushion Distortion only a plus4 to correct you can see it corrects in a
25:20
nice linear fashion and really only a plus 28 to correct for the vignette in the corners and that is way less than
25:27
the other two lenses which were into the 80s to correct on that end no major problem with longitudinal style
25:34
chromatic aberration you can see there's a little bit of fringing there on the test chart nothing significant and if in
25:40
this kind of shot I did see just a little bit more for example here and up in this area here than what I would see
25:48
with the 16 to 55 Mark I but there's far less than what the sigma shows so this is a nice middleof the road performance
25:54
and I don't consider that to be any kind of real issue you're not really seeing that in the image itself now the lateral
26:01
style chromatic aberration you can see just a little of them here in the corners just a little bit of color on
26:07
what should be black and white not too bad out in this real world shot I did see maybe a little bit more of the
26:13
purple fringing the what I expected but again it's not significant you're not really going to see that unless you're
26:18
zooming into a you know a onetoone magnification on a high resolution body
26:24
now speaking of high resolution bodies what we're going to find here is looking at 40 megapixels and I'm going to
26:30
examine this test chart at 200% magnification so this is 16 mm f2.8
26:35
center of the frame really looking quite good good contrast good Detail no complaints there moving here into the
26:41
mid-frame again that's looking pretty great as I pan down this bill looking
26:46
pretty consistent a little bit sharper here than here but as we get down here we're still looking fairly good contrast
26:54
is dropping but as we get towards the corner you can see that the resolution drops off other side of the frame it's
27:00
kind of the same story looking fairly good here softer over in this Edge and you can really see it up here where
27:06
again it looks pretty good in that area but getting a little bit softer off into this corner you can see a little bit of
27:12
that fringing there now stopping down to F4 you can see it does give some contrast boost in the center of the
27:18
frame definitely an improvement there also in the midf frame uh you can see that the darks are just noticeably
27:24
darker here if we pop back over to this corner you can see if we're looking in this Zone it's really not changed very
27:31
much and definitely still soft up here that's true as we stop down to f5.6 and still true at f8 so basically
27:39
the rest of the image looks quite good but the corners never really fully sharpen up at least into the edges now
27:47
we can see that defraction is going to start to set in by f11 on a high resolution body so it's a little bit
27:52
softer but as you get to F16 and in particular F22 which the minimum aperture defraction is killing the image
27:59
so if you're shooting in a high resolution body avoid those apertures now moving on to 23 mm really gives us
28:06
the high water mark here now our maximum apture is just f3.5 um F4 here shown on the right but
28:12
you can see in the center of the frame looking great good contrast good detail mid-frame looks really fantastic you
28:19
know there's a very Mild improvement by F4 you can see it kind of in this Zone here but really everything looks quite
28:25
excellent and if we look up here into the corner you can see that the corner is looking quite good and there's
28:31
already at F 3.3 there's a level of sharpness that we really never saw at 16
28:36
mm even at you know like an f5.6 or an f8 type aperture moving on to 35 mm
28:44
34.3 technically this maximum apture is f3.5 now I've got f5.6 on the right you
28:51
can see that it's looking good not as excellent as what it was at 23 mm pretty
28:57
good result over overall mid-frame looks really quite good we'll look at the other side we haven't looked there again
29:03
looking good and stopping down a bit gives us just a little bit more panning back up here into the corner we can see
29:10
the corners aren't as excellent as what they were but they're they're very good and you can see again in the extreme
29:16
Corner not quite as good but looking pretty strong overall here's a real world image at a 41 millimet basically
29:25
f4.5 and if we take a look here can see if we punch in that focus is excellent
29:30
and detail and contrast are looking really good this is the kind of image that I never saw shooting with the 18 to
29:36
55 mm it just didn't perform this well on a 40 megapixel sensor now at least on
29:42
the copy I'm testing at 55 mm the there's a little bit of a a regression you can see the contrast really isn't
29:49
quite as good like the lettering isn't quite as dark uh looking here is looking you know not bad but with lower contrast
29:56
and ironically the the MTF says that everything should be dropping off into the corners you know the corners
30:02
comparatively look relatively good compared to everywhere else in the frame um not as sharp obviously but really not
30:10
all that much of a regression and we can see if we stop down just a little bit to F 5.6 there is some improvement there
30:16
and so you can definitely get better contrast by doing that but what I did find if I shot kind of a comparative
30:23
image out in the real world I just never felt like the results at 50 mm just had
30:30
the same kind of Pop to them so here's 16 mm getting nice and close you can see it looks really really good contrast
30:37
good detail there looking at the 50 mm result ah it's just it's not really that
30:43
great by comparison likewise this landscape comparison f6.3 for both
30:49
images if we're looking at the Lighthouse which is the point of focus here you can see it's not nearly as
30:54
magnified but you can see that the detail and contrast is just it's good at 16 millim and here at 50 mm
31:02
it's it's a little bit disappointing to me and that's the way that I felt about a lot of real world shots unfortunately
31:08
that means that although the level of magnification is great because of not having great contrast here you know the
31:15
image doesn't look bad overall but if I'm looking in you know at the detail the detail because of that contrast
31:21
isn't really all that fantastic here's another up close result and we can see that again the amount of magnification
31:28
is awesome I like the image actually overall I just don't love it here as far as the contrast level here in this image
31:34
what you're going to find is that on the bad side you know the quantity of the bouquet every all the specular
31:40
highlights are quite small even at our maximum aperture here you can see there is some concentric circles and some
31:46
outlining which I don't love what I do like however is that the geometry is actually the best of the bunch um with
31:52
less deoration mostly round all throughout the frame so that part's good there's just not as much defocus as what
31:59
the other lenses can achieve so in this image I like the boa fine you know the detail looks pretty good you know Boke
32:07
looks fairly nice here but uh this is by the way this is at a lower resolution point 26 megapixels on the xm5 in an
32:14
image like this again um image looks pretty good overall but the amount of
32:20
defocus here is just less what of what I saw when I did direct comparisons with the other lenses again this looks fairly
32:26
soft here so if you get close you can get a fairly soft looking background finally taking a look at the flare
32:33
resistance you can see in this image that there's really really very very bright sun coming through the the window
32:40
so you can see a little bit of a ghosting pattern here contrast is held up quite well stopping down to f11
32:45
you're getting a little bit more of this Prismatic effect and that's part of just coming through the glass itself looking
32:51
at the ghosting artifact it's a little bit more pronounced but not too bad in contrast is holding up here without any
32:58
kind of window out in the real world uh the sun is quite bright here but I didn't see any kind of flare artifact so
33:05
overall a pretty good performance when it comes to flare and in general with you know some minor missteps I think
33:12
that overall the the detail the contrast is fairly good a little disappointed on
33:17
the telephoto end but other than that looking pretty good and so as you can see this is a lens that is mostly good
33:24
with a little bit of bad thrown in there overall however as I said earlier I think it is a really strong kit lens if
33:31
that is the way that you're looking at it as always thanks for watching have a great day and let the light in
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