Fuji 18mm review

I have brought a used Fuji 18mm F/2 R despite from the mixed bag reviews among the Internet. The reason is I need a small 28mm full frame equivalent FOV for my street work and the 18mm F/2 lens is the only choice and glad that I made the purchase.









You would ask why not using 35mm equivalent instead of 28mm? The answer is I like both. 28mm give you a more dramatic look when shooting close up and easier to include more background in the crowd, which is very useful in a small and crowded city like Hong Kong.

Let's have some images (All images processed by lightroom 5, some of them used the VSCO film preset)

As You can see, 28mm FOV is very versatile. If I can have one focal length, I would chose the 28mm FOV without any hesitation.

In order to make room for my purchase, I sold my Panasonic 14mm F/2.5 lens) for my OMD, micro 4/3) which is also have a 28mm FOV. I have 2 reasons behind  I prefer Fuji instead of Olympus. First, Fuji provide depth of field chart on the LCD screen in the manual mode, which is awesome for use zone focusing technique for my close up street work ( I used f/8 or smaller during the day and f/3.2 or smaller at night to give me as much as in focus area as possible. Second, I want to do more color work and Fuji provide better color I my OMD.

I prefer the original 3:2 frame from the Fuji rather than the 4:3 frame from the OMD because of the wider look.

It is very easy to include myself in the scene with the wide angle lens







Architecture and cityscape shots

 All close up shot are using zone focusing technique. This shot was done by F/3.2

This lens works well with the X-Trans sensor which can push and pull quite a lot of the tonal contrast.
18mm with X-E1 is really compact and really stealthy on the street ^^

Interesting scene

The corner is soft at wide open, but I use at least f/2.8 or f/3.2 for general and f/5.6 or smaller for landscape( I need better depth of field) the sharpness and the image quality are very good to my eye. 

I don't have the direct comparison, IMHO the IQ is a better than OMD with Panasonic 14mm.

Autofocus is snappy and fast enough for daily use except for close up moving object.

Color is just so pleasing...

 More use for the landscape

 What a setup

Distortion is the worse thing of this lens. For landscape shooter, I suggest you download the lightroom lens profile by roger100c in the Adobe lens profile downloader to correct the distortion, also use F/8 to have the best corner sharpness as possible. For portrait use, distortion is a non issue for me. 

It is not a perfect lens, but it is a very good and fun lens which can about to do everything.

Please feel free to comments!

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