Fujifilm XF 33mm f/1.4 - One Month Review - My New Normal?

in today's video i'll be offering my thoughts and review of the brand new fujifilm xf 33 millimeter f 1.4 after a month of use [Music] hi everyone welcome back to the channel this is dylan goby and welcome back to another gear short now this week's video is going to be about the brand new xf 33 millimeter f 1.4 from fujifilm uh we got these about a month ago in korea and i was on the waiting list so i got one of the first ones and i've had it for about a month now so i feel like i'm ready to start maybe talking a little bit about how it's been to use and how it compares to the xf 35 millimeter f 1.4 now we are going to do quite a few uh comparisons with the xf 35 millimeter not because they're the same lens or that one replaces the other but because i think a lot of people are going to be deciding between one of the two to fill a certain role in their photography so i'll definitely make comparisons where they're needed between these two lenses so with this lens we're dealing with the quote unquote normal lens so it renders uh distance in your photos very much the way that your eye might see it so you're not going to see a lot of perspective distortion either way you're not going to see the the lengthening of things that you might see with a wide angle lens or that sort of perceived compression that you might see with uh with a telephoto lens so very much what we're what our eyes are used to seeing and so a comfortable focal length for a lot of different uses now for me basically i'm using it for my family sessions my couple sessions my corporate events and then also i'm going to use it a lot as a walk around lens before we jump in and talk about the lens though i did want to mention that on november 13th i will actually be presenting my work in a conversation with the royal photographic society india chapter and so we'll be talking a lot about my tattoos of asia project and my documentary work and things like that and the topic will be very much sort of what it is that i do why i do it and how i go about finding my subjects so if you're interested in things like that i will put the the link below and you can go ahead and sign up for that it is free and we will be doing it on zoom because of the uh the current situation so a little bit different from what we're talking about today but if you're interested in something like that please do sign up i'd love to see you there all right so first things first before we get into actually using the lens uh let's just take a look at it sort of physically so it is a whole new design and the first thing you're going to notice is that it is a little bit bigger than the 35 millimeter f 1.4 and that is to accommodate this internal focusing system the new focusing motors and quite a bit more glass so it is a little bit bigger it is a little bit heavier but for my uses i haven't really noticed that to be much different it's not really a problem it sort of feels a little bit like a smaller lighter xf 56 millimeter f 1.2 so in terms of fitting it into my bag i had to move around a couple of dividers just so that i could accommodate a slightly larger lens but small price to pay for having a really really good quality lens in your bag being a slightly larger heavier lens i do think it's better suited to bodies like the xt4 the x-pro 3 rather than smaller lighter bodies like the xe4 so for me i don't really worry about these things but i know a lot of people talk about bodies getting very front heavy and i feel like on the smaller lighter bodies this is despite not being a big heavy lens going to be enough to sort of tip it over and you might want to look at something like the 35 millimeter f 1.4 or the 35 millimeter f2 if that's something that bothers you one thing that has come with the sort of more modern redesign of the uh the optical system in this lens is actually a sort of a more modern looking body now this feels a lot more like the design of say the 90 millimeter f2 or the new 50 millimeter f1 rather than the sort of original lenses from fujifilm like this little guy the one thing that did bother me about this whole redesign though is that fujifilm still hasn't updated these little clips these little plastic clips in their hoods and so i've found with every single lens that i own that i've had to replace the hood at some point or another because these just break when you click them in so hopefully i'm wrong and this one is made of a slightly sturdier plastic but the clips look exactly the same as all the other lenses that i own and it's always been an issue for me again comparing this lens to the 35 millimeter f 1.4 one of the things that i and i think a lot of people had uh trouble with with the uh f 1.4 version is actually trying to clean this front element if you don't use a filter on the front of this and you actually have to try and clean the front element it is a convex piece of glass and so it sort of dips down into the corners there and it can be very hard to clean the edges of the lens this guy on the other hand uses pretty much the same size element but it's actually a concave element so it's a little bit easier to clean now before my filter arrived i did have to clean it a couple of times and it was very very easy to clean so that's a good update the other thing with that design of course is that the 35 millimeter had this sort of telescoping external focus design so this piece would move back and forward and if you happen to be blocking that as you turn the camera on there was a chance you could uh damage or break the motors in there and so this guy actually uses a fully internal design so there's no more telescoping with the lens when you turn it on of course the the internal elements do move but you will not see the end extend on this lens so that's a welcome design change before we get into the interesting stuff let's talk a little bit about the technical optical qualities of this lens now one of the things that a lot of people complained about with the xf 35 millimeter was that it wasn't really the sharpest and most contrasty lens uh wide open so you would get this sort of almost a softening of details and colors would sort of blend into each other a little bit and you know in compared to say the 35 millimeter f2 which was sharp and contrasty and punchy this gave a little bit more of an old-school feeling to the to the rendering and so a lot of people wanted a sharper uh more contrasty lens and the 33 millimeter is definitely going in that direction it's a much sharper lens so let's start from just looking at the center here as you can see in this first image at f 1.4 you get a lot more detail from the 33 millimeter now if we switch out the right hand side image to the 35 millimeter at f2 you'll actually see that they're pretty close in sharpness in the center at this point so you're getting basically the f2 or f 2.8 sharpness that you got from the 35 millimeter at f 1.4 in the 33 millimeter so a big improvement there the one area that we do see a big performance increase in is actually corner sharpness now with this lens i don't typically put anything that i want to have a lot of detail in in the far corners of my of my images but if you're doing something like a lay flat or some advertising or something like that where you really need corner to corner sharpness uh the 33 millimeter is going to be a big improvement over the 35 millimeter so as we can see in the corners here the 33 millimeter renders quite a bit of detail wide open and once you stop down to f 2.8 or f4 you're getting pretty close to the amount of detail that you get in the center whereas the 35 millimeter is absolutely awful in the corners if you're considering sharpness when it's wide open and by f 2.8 or f4 it starts to become a little bit sort of usable but still not great the next thing i want to talk about is chromatic aberrations so let's first talk about the color fringing that you might see around high contrast edges now it's definitely there in the 33 millimeter but it's a lot less prominent than with the 35 millimeter so if we zoom in and take a look at these tree branches here what you'll see is that we still get a little bit of that green fringing around the edges there in both lenses but if we stop down to f2 on the 33 millimeter you'll actually see that it starts to go away very quickly whereas with the 35 millimeter we still get quite a bit of that fringing now of course you can deal with that in post-production so it's not always a big issue but if you're looking to get the most perfect image straight out of camera then the 33 millimeter is definitely a little bit better than the 35. this is not something that generally bothers me but there is always at least one person who asks about coma whenever you see a lens review so the 33 millimeter does exhibit a little bit of coma wide open and you can sort of see it in the corner of this frame here nowhere near as much as the 35 millimeter did so it's definitely going to be a little bit better uh in that regard for say astro photography or if you're shooting uh you know street lights little pin lights wide open at night and once you stop down to f2 with the 33 millimeter it's pretty much gone so you've got a fairly good lens a fairly good amount of correction for coma in there the final thing i want to very quickly mention here is the vignette now wide open you're going to get about a two-thirds stop darkening in the far corners and by f2 it becomes about a third of a stop by f 2.8 it's practically unmeasurable and by f4 it's completely gone so i'll talk a little bit more about the vignette in the optical characteristics section but for now that's roughly the vignette that you'll get wide open now that we're done with all the boring stuff let's jump in and talk a little bit about the optical characteristics now when it came to the 35 millimeter f 1.4 uh there was this idea that was floating around that there was some sort of magic built into this lens and that everything you pointed at just looked wonderful some people liked that some people didn't like that idea and it started quite a few flame wars online now we're not going to address whether or not it has some sort of magic inside but i am going to discuss it from the perspective of sort of how these two lenses differ now a lot of that magic from this lens came from i guess it's imperfections so you're looking at things like you know uncorrected chromatic aberrations and the slight softness and things like that gave it a bit more of an old-timey uh feeling that you might get from say an old lens from the film mirror rather than something that you might see in say a zeiss otis or one of the new sigma lenses that are extremely well corrected and produce these sort of technically perfect images this lens was a bit of a deviation from that and i think this is what sort of divided people people either loved that idea or hated that idea some people wanted some technically good images some wanted this sort of slightly off but beautiful image and it could produce those things in certain situations however this lens takes a step in the direction of the more modern designs like your xyzotus or your sigma lenses and things like that and gives a little bit more sharpness a little bit more correction but does it still maintain that feeling was the question that a lot of people had and the question that i had when i bought it as well in today's video i'm not going to give you the answer to that question but i am going to put quite a few images on the screen so that hopefully you can see the differences for yourself and decide if it's enough to warrant maybe upgrading to this lens or to make you choose between one or the other using this first photo which is a portrait of my wife that i took on a foggy sunrise on a recent trip that we took together i want to talk a little bit about the bokeh from the 33 millimeter and how it differs from that of the 35 millimeter now i took this photo from the same spot so i didn't move back to accommodate the slightly tighter field of view from the 35 millimeter so it's not a perfect comparison but i wanted to keep it at that same distance to see how things would render so the first thing that i noticed with the bokeh from the 33 millimeter is that it is a little bit softer than the bokeh from the 35 millimeter if we look really closely at the areas around the the twigs and the leaves and everything i feel like the 35 millimeter has a little bit more of a jittery a little bit more of a nervous feeling to it whereas the 33 millimeter has this very soft almost sort of uh painted feeling to it in the second image we're going to be looking at some pokeballs from a street shot that i took a couple of weeks back now if you look very closely at these again you'll notice that the 33 millimeter produces slightly rounder balls slightly smoother balls and if we look very very closely you can actually see that the 35 millimeter displays quite a bit more chromatic aberration around the sides of those bowls again which one of these you prefer is going to be down to your personal taste and the type of images that you like to shoot so please let me know in the comments which one you prefer and if there's anything you feel like i might have missed when i looked at the bulky there one thing that the 33 millimeter can do that the millimeter simply cannot do is producing these beautiful sun stars so if you're shooting something like a cityscape at night or the sun poking around a tree or a building or something like that and you want to get those beautiful long sun stars it's simply not going to happen with the 35 millimeter but the 33 millimeter produces absolutely gorgeous sunstars so let's take a look at a sample here and this first image was shot at f 1.4 so you can see that that deep vignette is sort of bringing the edges of the the image in there and you can also see that the sun even being right at the edge of the frame is not causing any nasty flare or any loss of contrast or anything like that now in this second image i've stopped down to f16 and slightly changed the composition so i could get a full sun star in there but you can see that we get these beautiful long lines coming out from that central point so if that's something that you're into the 33 millimeter is definitely a great lens for that when it comes to vignettes this is something that i personally don't correct for very often i actually quite like the the natural pull that you get towards the center of the frame from having a vignette now it's not a very deep vignette on this lens but it's just enough that say in you know a portrait or a family a shot or something like that that you're going to get this beautiful sort of focus being pulled towards the center and as i mentioned before it's pretty much gone by f 2.8 anyway and you can correct it in software if you don't like it the final thing that i've noticed when i've been out shooting with the 33 millimeter is that when you shoot wide open into bright light sources like the sun i have seen these sort of red flares pop up occasionally now you might have seen uh if you've watched my lower 33 millimeter 0.95 review that i absolutely loved the the rings that you get when you shoot straight into the sun with that lens and the 33 millimeter produces little pieces of those and i've i've been trying to figure out how it is that it creates them how i can create them using this lens and if i can make them even bigger so i'll keep working on that and if i figure out a way to do it i will create a little video on how to do that but looking for it hopefully we can make it happen as i really love that kind of effect so on to what it's actually like to work with the 33 millimeter as opposed to the 35 millimeter so as i mentioned in the beginning of this video i do work with it in a lot of my couple and family sessions unfortunately i won't be able to show you a lot of these images today because a lot of my clients still haven't seen their images and i would like them to be the first people to see them rather than the people of youtube so i'm sorry about that but you'll have to take my word for it as to what it's like to actually work with it so at these sessions what i've found is that the auto focus is absolutely lightning fast compared to the uh 35 millimeter now the 35 millimeter never really gave me too many problems when i was in sort of slow moving situations you know even a family walking down i could get pretty much every frame in focus and when it came to you know static portraits and things even at f 1.4 it just never missed however with the 33 millimeter once you've dialed in the auto focus settings and we'll get to that in a moment you can actually just be pretty much guaranteed that even with fast moving subjects you're just not going to miss now when it comes to actually dialing in those autofocus settings this is something that i want to talk about a little bit and hopefully we can see updates to in in firmware coming in the future fujifilm's autofocus system is let's say complex there's a lot of little settings that you have to do you have to put in for different situations to make the camera focus on different types of moving subjects and things like that and i feel like at this point fujifilm is sort of expecting us as photographers to have a degree in their autofocus algorithm in order to be able to get everything in focus that we want to and i hope that that can be a lot more simplified in the future and we can have sort of a unified afc that will just work however when it comes to the except 35 millimeter f 1.4 i found that the general setting in the afc worked pretty well and i was able to get you know a lot of images 1995 in focus when we were doing you know walking along and things like that that dropped a little bit significantly if we were doing something like running or something like that a little bit faster moving but it was generally pretty good what i found with the 33 millimeter is that was not the case i came home from my first session with it and i sort of thought okay well this is you know getting a lot more out of focus than i was expecting however i moved it over to i believe one of the settings is rapidly changing rapidly accelerating and decelerating and the other one is suddenly appearing and with those two settings i got a lot higher hit rate when it came to things like kids because they're quite unpredictable in their movements so it takes a little bit of getting used to um but once you dail once you dial those things in it just doesn't miss and i don't have to check anymore to make sure i got you know the perfect expression in perfect focus i can just sort of trust it now which is a really big thing at my family sessions to literally not have to be walking between locations quickly checking the photos to make sure everything is in focus when it comes to fast moving stuff so all in all autofocus is extremely impressive there's no more hunting like we would see with the older lenses like the 35 millimeter in afs it is simply zip and it's there and so for example a couple of weeks back i did school portraits for one of our local schools and i shot i think it was 296 people in two days and over the course of those full two days i found six images that were out of focus and four of those were due to kids squirming around and not being able to focus as they moved so quickly and the other two were either lens or user error so that's a pretty good track record for having made 290 something portraits i think and i was extremely impressed in terms of afc it has become a lot more faster and a lot more accurate once you're able to dial in those settings for the way that you're shooting and the types of subjects that you're shooting to demonstrate that autofocus let's take a quick look at a couple of videos that i shot the other thing that i wanted to test against the 35 millimeter was actually focusing at really far distances so close to infinity and things like that with the 35 millimeter i found it was a little bit touch and go uh if you were focusing on say you know a cityscape a long ways away or a portrait that was you know you were 10 15 meters from the subject or something like that i often found that you'd have to stop down the 35 millimeter just to ensure you had enough depth of field to cover its slightly missing focus with the 33 millimeter i have found that that is not an issue at all so to demonstrate this i'll show you the same image that i showed for the coma demonstration earlier and we'll take a look at the actual bridge itself now i focused and refocused several times made different images again and again and again and in each case i found that the 33 millimeter nailed perfect focus and the 35 millimeter this was the closest that it got so at far distances the 33 millimeter focuses a lot more accurately than the 35. okay so i've spent the last 15 or 20 minutes or so chatting about the 33 millimeter and the improvements that have been made and how it compares to the 35 millimeter so in the end as a self-professed fanboy of the 35 millimeter and somebody who has in the past said that the sharpness isn't really an issue it's quite good it's good enough the autofocus really isn't an issue it's good enough and that i really love the rendering of it which lens is going to occupy a space in my bag going forward i'll be honest here and say it's actually going to be the 33 millimeter this lens has improved on all of those things without really sacrificing in my opinion uh the quality of the images that comes out of it they haven't become too technically perfect they haven't become too sharp there's still a little bit of a softness there there's some beautiful soft transitions in the colors and everything there for me this is the better lens for the work that i do for my family sessions it's going to mean more photos in focus when we're doing fast moving stuff for my couple sessions it's going to mean greater detail for my corporate events it's going to mean better focusing in low light for all of those things this is the lens for me as always i hope that you've enjoyed this video and if you do have any questions about the 33 millimeter or how it compares to the 35 millimeter please do leave them in the comments below now i don't actually have access to the 35 millimeter f2 so i won't be able to sort of accurately answer any questions when it comes to comparing those but as for these two lenses i'll do my best to help out if i can of course as with all of my videos i do have a slideshow of photos shot with the 33 millimeter at the end of this video so please stick around for that but as always thank you guys so much for watching and if you haven't already please do like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next one [Music] 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Channel: Dylan Goldby

Views: 15,159

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Id: RLSaNAzfang

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021