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(upbeat rock music) - Welcome to Pal2tech. Today we are going to review the brand new Fujifilm 16 to 80 millimeter zoom lens. I've had this lens with
me nonstop for 11 days now in a variety of shooting
situations and locations. I'm gonna tell you what I think about it, the things I like and
the things I don't like. Before we get into it,
I wanna let you know that this video is not sponsored. I didn't get a prereleased
version of this lens sent to me for free. This is the final version of the lens, the one that's released to
you and I and everyone else. Fujifilm has no idea
I'm making this video. I paid for this lens myself. I ordered it from Samy's
Camera in Los Angeles, and I paid $887.54 for this lens. (soft electronic music) There's been a lot of
anticipation building up to the release of this lens. Its official name is Fujinon
XF 16 to 80 millimeter f/4 R OIS WR. And I think it it sort of fills the gap between the 18 to 55 millimeter and the 16 to 55 millimeter. What you have here is a
16 to 80 millimeter zoom with a constant f/4 aperture throughout the entire focal range. The glass itself contains
16 elements in 12 groups, and man, looking at it, (chuckles) you could really
see that beautiful glass. You're getting the equivalent
of a 24 to 120 millimeter range in full frame format. The aperture range on
this lens is f/4 to f/22 in 1/3 stops. The front thread on the
lens is 72 millimeters. Now that's really cool. So if you have already
filters on the 50 to 140 that are already 72 millimeters, you can share them with this new lens, it's awesome for that. Like other Fujinon lenses,
it comes with a standard plastic lens hood, but here's
the thing that's interesting: this lens hood right here
is actually different, almost a redesign and it's much better than the prior lens hoods
that Fujifilm released. With other lens hoods, plastic ones, sometimes you have to, you know, turn 'em like that,
they're a little bit rough. This one is loose, it's like really loose when you put it on. Once you turn it and you
get it all the way over, it clicks into place. It's a really nice, smooth
click, and it's firm. I like the lens hood. I still wish it were
made out of metal though, but that's another story. I did notice that the
aperture ring is pretty tight, maybe a bit too tight for my liking. But, you know what, I'd rather have than a very loose aperture ring. Same with the zoom ring. This thing is secure. It is not one of those zoom lenses that you turn it upside and it, you know, doing, comes falling out. It's not gonna happen with
this lens, it's pretty tight. It's weather resistant, and
it's sealed in 10 locations, and you can go shooting
outside in temperatures as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 10 Celsius. Interesting, there's this weird
little drawer-looking thing right here that says Weather Resistant. I don't know if you can see that. It's funny because I didn't see that on any other Fuji lens,
and it looks like something where you put your fingernail in it and pull out a drawer where you put a gel or, like, (chuckles)
a filter or something. It's kinda cool. This lens features six stops
of image stabilization, and this makes it great in low light despite its f/4 aperture. Image stabilization was
incredible on this lens for both stills and video. Check this out, okay,
the video on the left is shot without OIS, and
the video on the right is shot with OIS. Have a look at that, look at that! That's incredible, it
almost looks like the camera is bolted to a tripod, but
I was holding it like this. Unbelievable, really nicely done. Ah, I love it. Let's look at a still photo now. Okay, so I shot this one,
handholding the camera, at f/4, zoomed all the
way in to 80 millimeters. And as you can see, at 1/30 of a second, you can see the fabric;
it's nice, it's clean, no problems there. Here is 1/15 of a second,
and you can still see kinda the details in the fabric. It's sharp, it's reasonably
sharp for 1/15 of a second, handheld, and I'm not
the best hand-holder. I'm, ah, I'm not that good, so I'm a really good test for this. And now moving down,
you've got 1/8 of a second. And okay, so it starts to get
a little bit fuzzy here at, but this is 1/8 of a second, and it's still a nice,
usable picture, you know, if you were forced to use
1/8 of a second handheld. So again, wow! Now there's one interesting
thing about OIS: there's no OIS on or off
switch anywhere on the lens. It's very minimalist. When the lens is attached to the camera and the camera's on the tripod, the lens adjusts OIS automatically. Now you can turn off
OIS, but you need to go into the camera's menu to do so. This lens weighs just about
one pound, or 440 grams. And it feels great on the camera. Size and weight-wise,
this lens is incredible. You're getting f/4 all the
way from 16 to 80 millimeters in a lens that's just a
bit heavier and bulkier than the kit 18 to 55 millimeter. And compared to the 16 to 55 millimeter, this lens is as light as a feather. It is a great travel lens. In fact, a few days ago, I
flew to Maryland with it, right on Southwest Airlines. This lens went through
security and in those bins and on and off the plane, and you know, bumping up against the aircraft
windows taking pictures. Now I wanted to kind of have this lens in a real on-the-go
travel-type of environment to see how it handled. And my conclusion is that,
in traveling with this lens, it nails everything that I'd ever want in a single lens for get-up-and-go
one-lens-only photography with a minimum of hassle. You know what? I can get some glue and
glue this on, right? And just (grunts) glue it on the camera, throw it in the backpack
and go around the world and pretty much get most
of the shots I'd want with the focal range offered by this lens and the beautiful background isolation. For sheer versatility
balanced with autofocus speed for lightweight travel zoom shots, this is a really good lens for that. (soft rock music) Now let's talk about focus and zoom. It utilizes an external
telescopic zoom design. That's unlike the 50 to 140 where the-- (camera clicking)
everything's inside. With this lens, if you're
doing street photography and you need to be kinda discreet, well (chuckles) this just screams out, I have a lens, I have a lens! It's a little bit, whoa okay. But that's exactly the extra range you get on this lens versus the 18 to 55 that makes such a major
difference when out traveling or doing street photography. You really notice it when
you're trying to take shots of things that you can't
quite walk up and get to. One thing I didn't care
for was the zoom ring's ergonomics with shooting video. I found it to be a little
rough and jerky like when zooming in for video shots; a little tight for my taste. This lens has a minimum,
are you sitting down? Has a minimum focusing
distance of 1.4 inches, that's 35 centimeters, over the entire zoom range. This was so nice, and I was very impressed with the background and the results I was able to get with
it at such a close range. Autofocus: fast, fast, fast; very fast and quiet. I give it a great score on that. It works very well in AF-C Zone mode, quickly switching with
a minimum of lag time. Now if you don't know what AF-C Zone is, then please be sure to
watch my focus modes of the X-T3 video and
I'll have a link below. But let's get through the
remainder of this video first. (soft rock music) A zoom lens is always about compromise, and I try to keep that in
mind when testing this lens, particularly because
I also happened to own the incredible 16 to 55. Here's what I found in a nutshell. Starting wide open at 16 millimeter f/4, we have nice contrast and
sharpness in the center, no problems there. As you move toward 80
millimeter, keeping f/4, the corners start to improve a bit until you hit 50 millimeters, at which point there's
really kind of a nice sharpness across the entire frame. However, once you hit
80 millimeter at f/4, the corners, I think, are blurry and weak. Have a look, here it is at f/4, there's the center at f/4, not bad. Look at the corner, not so
good, not so good there. Just for the heck of it, I
compared f/4 on this lens with f/4 on the on the kit
18 to 55 millimeter lens, both fully zoomed in;
let's take a look at that. So the photo on the left
is the 16 to 80 millimeter, and the photo on the right
is the 18 to 55 millimeter. And as I zoom all the way in,
I do like the center for sure. The center is much nicer
at the maximum focal length on the 16 to 80. However, the corner, interestingly enough, not so good, not so good. I prefer the kit lens, quite honestly. The best and sharpest place for this lens is at 50 millimeter, f/5.6. No surprise, no doubt there, where you pretty much
have sharpness everywhere. I also compared center sharpness with both this lens and the 18 to
55 fully extended at f/4, and the 16 to 80 is definitely
shaper at the center at the focal range. So here you can see
the picture on the left is the 16 to 80, and
the picture on the right is the 18 to 55. Clearly, clearly, the
center, fully zoomed in on the 16 to 80 is sharper. And I actually prefer the background of the 18 to 55 millimeter kit lens, but they're so similar,
and the color rendering is a little bit, in my
opinion, more noticeable on the 18 to 55. Here's the background here fully zoomed in at 80 millimeter f/4. Here we are at f/8, and here we are at f/16. And as you can see, they
change, look at that. And so here, on f/4, you have these really nice, pleasing, fadey-type of dreamy swirls. As we go here, they become
more defined at f/8. And all the way at
f/16, I still found them to be very pleasing. I like the background on this lens a lot. Here's a shot kinda
taken at mid focal range at about 42, maybe 43 millimeters. And as you can see, the
background is very, very pleasant. Look at that; here's 65
millimeters at f/4, not bad. And you can clearly see the
circular patterns there. Here we are fully zoomed in at f/4. (chuckles) I love this shot. Fully zoomed in at f/4,
and as you can see, nice, I kinda like this. Here's the thing: it really comes down to personal preference in a lot of ways. But for me, personally, I definitely think the background rendering
and subject isolation on this lens is wonderful. I didn't have to time to test
much on studio portraits, but I did get a quick informal shots. And one thing I noticed
was that eye tracking, face-eye autodetect with this lens, I found, didn't do quite as
good a job as the 18 to 55. Take a look at this. Here's a shot, this was
all face-eye autodetect, and this is fully zoomed
in at f/4, 80 millimeters. And it just looks a little
bit on the soft side to me, almost like it didn't
quite nail the focus there. Here though, it did get a little bit more. But then, this one here, I was surprised. I thought that I would get more keepers with face-eye autodetect on this lens. Now I didn't have time to really get and dig into this further, so please take what I'm saying
about face-eye autodetect and this lens with a grain of salt. I'm gonna be testing it more, but something that I did want
to at least mention to you that I noticed on the lens, not a deal breaker at all, but yeah. (soft instrumental music) However, the other problem
is a big problem for me, and it has to do with shooting video. Let me explain the setup to you. I'm in video mode, I am holding
the camera just like this. I have this set to manual focus. Everything on the camera is set manually, there's no automatic anything. I then zoomed all the way in, and I manually focused, till it was sharp. And then while I was shooting,
all I did was I zoomed out. Then I zoomed in again, then I zoomed out. And I did this test with
both OIS on and OIS off. I had the same results. Have a look at this. Here we are, clear, sharp. Now I'm pulling out, look at that. Did you see that, did you you see that? Look at that. See that, can you believe it? So it's wobbling, there's this
focus wobble issue going on. I thought, okay, well
maybe that's just how it is in all lenses and I'm
going nuts or something. So I tested the same
setup with the kit lens, the 18 to 55. So I'm pulling back,
and look at that, see? Not bad, there it is, it's not doing that focus zoom problem. There it is, it's just going in and out, like you'd think a lens would do. Then I thought, okay,
maybe I have a bad lens. Maybe I have a lemon, or maybe it's yellow and it tastes bitter, I don't know, but there's probably a bad copy
of the lens that I received. And I almost sent it
back to Samy's Camera. I thought, "Hey, you guys, you
know, get me a better lens." However, I have gone on and
visited other discussion boards, and I have seen other
YouTubers have the same issues to the point that I
believe they're very real and they need to be addressed. (soft rock music) I had really high
expectations for this lens. Some YouTube reviewers gave it
a perfect 10 out of 10 score. But for the focal range, the size, the autofocusing capability,
it seemed too good to be true. And for the most part, it
lives up to most of that. It is a great lens, but compared
to the 18 to 55 kit lens, the question of whether or
not you should spend $900 for the 16 to 80 is a more
difficult one to answer. If you already own the 18 to 55, I don't think you should
get this lens yet. While having f/4 through the
entire focal range is great, and as is the extra zoom, I'd say hold off, and
let's see if these issues I mentioned can be fixed
in a firmware update. Video is becoming more and more of a tool used by professional photographers, and I cannot recommend this lens right now because of this video issue. Zooming in and out, you know, that's a big part of making video. There's no rush to go out today and get this lens right away. Listen, let the dust settle a bit and see how Fujifilm responds to this. See what the other users are experiencing, and also take a look at
the RAW sample images shot with this lens, you can find online, and check out the YouTube video reviews that will undoubtedly be
coming out in the week to come. (sighs) You know, while
I'm glad that I purchased this lens, it's now
become more for the fact that I've been able to report out to you what I found with it than the
stellar quality of this lens. And to that end, I hope
that I've been able to help. Now YouTube does not allow
us to edit our videos once we publish them,
so everything I've said and shown here today to you
will be permanent forevermore. In fact, somebody might be
watching this video right now and have had this lens for
three years and love it. That being said, if
Fujifilm does address this with a firmware update
and fixes that video zoom wobble problem that I mentioned, or if, say, it turns out
that only two or three other people on planet Earth have noticed the issues that I've raised, then I promise you I will
do another update video and let you know this. We're not done with this lens quite yet. And I will be following
up as well as continuing to monitor the reviews and
the latest updates for it. In the meantime, thank
you so much for watching. I have some of the RAW
files I shot with this lens as well as comparison
ones with the 18 to 55, available for you to
download in the links below. Please let me know what
you think of this lens and in the comments, and I
will see you again real soon in the next video. So long for now. The best and sharpest
place for this lens-- - [Siri] I'm not sure I understand. - The best and sharpest place-- (dreamy 70's rock music)
