Fujifilm XF10-24mm WR Review - Fuji's Best Landscape Lens Just Got Better?

this is the fujifilm xf 10 to 24 millimeter f4 ois wr and that is the last time i'm going to be using its full name in this review because it's really a bit of a mouthful now the original version this one has long been my favorite landscape lens for the fujifilm system and i've been using this for about five years now now for as long as i've been a landscape photographer i've been addicted to wide-angle lenses the first lens that i ever bought for dslr was the sigma 10 to 24 for my nikon d80 and then when i was using a full frame system the 17 to 35 was my most used lens so when i switched to the fuji system this was the very first lens that i bought and i've been using it ever since it's gone with me all around the world and been used on thousands and thousands and thousands of images so in fujifilm announced that updated version of mark ii i was pretty excited and then a little bit disappointed when i learned that it is optically identical to the original version the internal workings the lens is exactly the same so there's no change whatsoever or there shouldn't be any change whatsoever in image quality but what fujifilm have done is updated the casing and some of the features of this lens and what i'm going to be doing in this review is looking at both of the lenses comparing them to make sure that there is no difference and seeing what the new features in the new version are like now this isn't in any way a technical review there's not going to be resolution charts or sharpness graphs or anything like that because that's just simply not the way that i shoot i'm a landscape photographer so what i'm interested in is how this lens is going to perform when i'm out in the field so what i'm going to be doing is looking at it in that respect and comparing it with the previous lens and looking what some of the new features do to improve the lens so what are you getting when you get a lens like this 10 to 24 is an ultra wide angle zoom which is equivalent to 15 to 36 on a full frame system and at its widest focal length at 10 millimeters it gives you that really epic feel where it feels like you can step into a foreground that's right up close to the camera with a scene that extends all the way to the back to mountains and sky you really can fit a lot in the scene now wide angle lenses are a little bit more tricky to compose with because they fit in so much but they do give you a feel that you simply can't get with any other kind of focal length and at the other end of the focal length 24 it's still wide angle it's equivalent to 36 but not quite that same ultra wide angle feel so it really is quite a flexible lens it gives you a really wide range of different ways of capturing the scene and that's one of the reasons why this lens has been well this lens the old version has been my most used lens by quite considerable amount over the five years that i've been using the fuji system fuji also make the 80 16 millimeter f 2.8 ultra wide angle zoom and that will give you two millimeters more at the wide end but you lose it the other end at 16 millimeter so it doesn't have the same flexibility as this lens and it's also considerably heavier and quite a lot bigger so it's nothing like as possible as this lens and on top of that it doesn't really take filters very well it takes filters but it's quite complicated to use them with this with a 72 millimeter filtering it's really easy to use filters with if you want to use a polarizer or an nd filter for a long exposure so for me this is a little bit more flexible now it has a fixed aperture of f4 all the way through the focal length it's f4 which is great for landscapes it's all you need for most landscapes because you're going to be shooting for the most part at f 7.1 or f8 which is where the lens performs at its best optically what it's not good for is if you want to shoot astro so if you want to be shooting the milky way or if you want to be shooting auroras when you really need a faster maximum aperture something like f 2.8 and for that the 8 to 16 is a fantastic lens but pretty much for anything else then i really do think that this lens is more flexible and the fact that it's smaller and lighter make it a more practical lens to use one of the things that i've always loved about this lens is how compact it is at a little bit over 400 grams it's always felt like a really light practical lens to use now the new version as soon as i picked it up felt lighter straight away and it actually is it's 25 grams lighter so a little bit less than 400 grams even though it's a little bit taller you can see it's a little bit longer because of changes in the case but it's nothing like as bulky as the 8-16 now that lighter weight isn't anything to do with a poor construction it still has the same reassuringly solid construction solid metal construction of the original version most of it is metal there's plastic on the zoom and focus rings and the aperture rings but it does feel really really solid the zoom is completely internal so when you zoom between 10 and 24 the lens barrel doesn't extend at all it's all happens inside the body but despite making it lighter they actually have managed to make this lens it's weather resistant now weather resistance is something that i know that a lot of people care a lot about it's something that people have been asking for on this lens for a long time and because it's a landscape lens it always makes sense that a landscape lens should have weather sealing now the original version that i've been using for five years it doesn't have it and i've used it in all kinds of conditions all over the world i've used it in spray next to the ocean next to waterfalls i've used it in blizzards i've used it down to about minus 27 degrees in really cold conditions it's been dropped in the snow it's been muddy it's got dust on it volcanic dust it's been used i tend to not baby my stuff it's at all it gets used and this has been dinged and banged around and used in all kinds of conditions and the lack of weather sealing has never been an issue for me however i do appreciate that uh having weather ceiling it is something it does give you that extra little bit of peace of mind particularly if you're using it with something like the xt3 or the xt4 which are weather sealed cameras you're going to really feel a lot safer using it with a wide angle lens though if you're using it in a in in things like rain or next to waterfall spring a bigger problem than weather sealing is the fact that spray gets on this great big front element making it almost impossible to shoot because you just got dots of water on the front so weather sealing for me it's not really that much of a deal breaker i don't think it's a reason to upgrade from the older version if you already have that but it is nice to have it is nice to know that things like humidity and dust are going to be kept out it just gives you a little bit of extra peace of mind when you're shooting in the field another thing that you'll notice is that the aperture ring is now marked from f4 all the way up to f22 and the aperture ring only moves between those two lows to the either end of the aperture range whereas on the previous previous version there was no no aperture markings and the aperture range just went round and round and round now i really like this because one of the things i've always liked about the fuji system is how tactile it is i like being able to look down at the camera when i'm using it and see the shutter speed on the dial see the eyes on the dial and it's really nice to be able to do that with the aperture as well without having to look through the screen or the evf and you'll also notice that on the aperture ring there's this red button here which is what you do if you want to just click into auto aperture mode if you want to go into aperture priority just click it and it's locked click it again and you go back into manual now on the previous version that was done on a button here so that button is now no longer here and also on the previous version you have this button to activate the ois the optical image stabilization now this lens like most of fuji's new lenses doesn't have that the 70s or 300 doesn't have that either because the ois is designed to work in connection with the image stabilization infuses newer cameras like the xd4 or the xs10 and the image stabilization is then activated through the menu system which also works with cameras which don't have image stabilization cameras like the xt3 now the oas fuji claim that it is has been improved by one stop so it's up to six and a half stops now when used with image stabilization on a camera the thing about wide-angle lenses is the image stabilization isn't as necessary as it is for telephotos or even mid-range zooms on a wide-angle lens because you're shooting at a wider focal length image shake is a lot less it's a lot less visible and you can shoot down to lower speeds without the image shake being noticeable so i'm not really sure how much an improvement of one stop is going to make in in practical terms but it's there all the same now another thing about this lens is it has a super close closest focal distance so when you're shooting at 10 millimeters it will focus on something that's just seven centimeters in front of the lens and even zooming in all the way to 24 millimeters it will still focus on something that's just about 10 centimeters in front of the lens now the performance is the same in both of those there's been no change whatsoever and one of the things that fuji also advertises is that there's almost no breathing when you change focus now what that means is that if you're focusing on something really close and then you change focus to focus on something really really far away quite often there are subtle small changes in composition in the framing of the scene as the focusing changes but that doesn't happen on this lens you can see here that when we change from the from focusing right in front of the lens to focusing on it far away there's actually very little change in the composition now where this is important in landscape photography is if you're shooting focus stack scenes so if you're shooting a scene where the thing closest to the lens like here is so close that it's impossible to get focused to infinity focus throughout the whole of the image so you have to shoot it in different frames with the focus in different places what that means when you don't have breathing is that between the different images that you shoot at different focal lengths the composition is going to be exactly the same which makes it much easier to blend later on now the last thing i'm going to say about focus is that the focus on both of these versions has not really been any change it's super fast when you change between focusing from something close to something something further away and it's incredibly silent it's a very quiet lens to use now the focus ring like on the previous version doesn't have a stop it turns all the way around but it's nice and wide very easy to use i tend to shoot most of my landscape images in manually using focus peaking and the focus ring on this and on the previous version is really nice to use it's got nice level of resistance and just works really really well for precise focusing but what about the images now i've always been really happy with the sharpness of this lens it's not quite as sharp as the 8064 and on my original version on this one i did have a phase once where i was noticing some softness on the on the right side of the frame but i think that's because i dinged it because i sent it to fuji they repaired it and it came back and it's fine now so this is generally a pretty sharp lens to use but let's have a look at some of the images that i've taken with it now it's been quite hard to do any real landscape photography with the lens due to covered restrictions that's meant it's been very difficult for me to leave lisbon but i did manage to get one afternoon out on the coast when i shot with the lens so let's have a look at this here and you can see here that it's it's got plenty of detail lots of detail in the water in the plant in the bottom here there's lots of detail this is just zoomed in to 100 right in the bottom corner here notice it gets a little bit soft in that bottom corner it's just that corner the other side is okay now i don't know if this could be a focus issue because this these plants were very close to the lens but i don't think so i think that's just lens softness but everywhere else you can see all the way in the cliffs it's pretty sharp not quite the sharp as we move into the distance these cliffs here but generally the lens the lens is performing quite well now just to look at the other end of the focal range this is at f5 and this is at 24 millimeter now generally i find the lens doesn't perform as well at that end of the of the focal length it tends to perform better at the wider engine around 10 to 12 millimeters but you can still see here at 24. it's plenty sharp it's not as sharp as a 10 10 millimeters but it certainly has enough detail looking down into the corners in the same bottom right corner here again i can notice a little bit of softness around these plants but generally there's a lot of detail here in all these bits of pieces on the ground now this is again shot at 10 millimeter this is shot at f4 because i was focused stacking here so i wanted to shoot really close up and get as much detail as i could close up and you can see here at f4 really close to the lens how much detail there is in the bar bark here now this this softness here this is focused because the camera is very close to the middle of the tree so what we have here right in the corner is just parts of the tree that were too close for the camera to be able to focus and then i shot an image focused on the background and you can see here again now i i forgot to change the aperture range here so this is shot at f4 where the lens doesn't perform as well as it does to the middle of the aperture range but you can see here there's lots of detail and the reason that i shot this is basically just to show that when when you change focus there is a little bit of breathing you can see around around here particularly the edge of this uh of the main trunk here that it changes position a little bit and again on the left side of the frame there but overall breathing is is is at a minimum here so it makes focus stacking a lot easier now this is again shot at f 7.1 in the middle of the aperture range where the lens performs at its best at 10 millimeters so let's just zoom in here and you can see here there's plenty of detail when we look in the background when we look in the leaves over here when we look at the building in the distance now the reason that i wanted to do this is just so we could compare the lens at different apertures so on the left here we've got at f 7.1 and then on the right here we've got at f22 so what we'll start to see is that when we zoom in to the f22 it's a lot softer here the lens doesn't perform that well at f22 most lenses don't perform well at f22 because of diffraction and you can see here there's quite a significant difference when we look at the bushes here when we look at the cars when we go over to this side and we look at the people around the kiosk or if we go up into the leaves here again the difference between the leaves here and here it's quite significant now we can look at the other end of the aperture range and switch the this to f point four so let's zoom in ah we're already zoomed in and again you can see that there's quite a big difference when the aperture is wide open at f4 when we look at these leaves here as opposed to those leaves on the left or if we look down at the weeds here around the trees it's much sharper in the f 7.1 version so the lens performs really really well at f 7.1 but when you move it to either end of the aperture range to f4 to f22 the closer you get the more you're going to start to get diffraction but right in the middle of the aperture range at f 7.1 f8 the lens is plenty plenty sharp enough now one thing that i wanted to do was also to compare with the older version so let's just put that in there now so on the right here we've got the old version ois and then on the left here we have the new version and you can see these are shot at identical um settings 132nd f7.1 160. i just basically took the lens out put the other lens in and here it starts to get very different difficult to see any difference now because the optics are exactly the same we really shouldn't be seeing any difference the lens actually performs very very similarly i can't really tell which one i can't really see a difference again the old version maybe looks a little bit sharper in the leaves here on on the on the right side when we move over to the left here then not really seeing any difference maybe the new version here the weather weather sealed version looks a little bit sharper but overall there's not really any difference between the the older version and the weather sealed version in terms of the optical performance you're not going to notice any significant difference but one thing that i did notice when i was doing these frames and you'll have to look at them individually to see is that there seems to be a small difference between the actual focal length so this is the new version and this is the old version and you can see it zooms in just a little bit again here it's showing at 10 millimeters on both of the frames so the older version seems to have a slightly different a slightly less wide when it's at 10 millimeters and i thought it was a little bit odd i thought maybe i'd move the camera so i did a test somewhere else this is the old version this is the new version now the camera's on a tripod all i did was take the lens one lens up put the other lens on without moving the camera without moving the tripod and you can see here it's actually relatively significant it looks probably about a millimeter difference so it's it's more like 11 meter millimeters and 10 10 millimeters and that was something that i didn't expect to see i looked at 24 millimeters didn't see any difference whatsoever at that end of the focal length but while the sharpness and the performance of the lens is exactly the same in my copy at least i did notice a small difference in the focal length at the widest at the widest part of the lens one other thing that i wanted to have a look at is the level of distortion so this is a 10 millimeter looking straight onto another building and again you can see here when we look at the straight lines along the top when we look at the straight lines down the side there's no distortion whatsoever the tiles all the lines are very very vertical and again you have a nice idea of the sharpness that you get at 10 millimeters at f7.1 lots of detail here now the distortion is actually handled using software inside the lens so when you import it into quechuan when you put it into lightroom what i'm using now you're not going to see any of the distortion but it's important to know the distortion is actually controlled in the lens in the camera but it's not controlled in any way by cropping into the frame so to all intents and purposes you do get a frame that actually has zero distortion and here's a quick look at the sun stars you can get from the lens this is a 10 millimeters and this next one this is zoomed in at 24 millimeters now the thing about sunstars is that they're most apparent when you've got the lens at its smallest aperture at f22 so you are going to get diffraction there's going to be a softness in the lens but this lens is capable of producing perfectly decent sun stars now this is how the lens deals with flare you can see when i'm looking straight at the sun there's a little bit of flare in the lens but as i turn past 45 degrees it disappears now all wide angle zooms are susceptible to flare it's just something that comes with using these kind of lenses so overall then for my purposes for landscape photography the lens is plenty sharp enough now you do see a significant drop off in sharpness if you go to f22 or if you go to f4 at either end of the aperture range but when you use the lens in its sweet spot which is what you're going to be doing for landscape photography when you've got the camera on a tripod and you don't have to worry about shake or hand holding the camera then the lens is plenty sharp enough now as i said i haven't really had a chance to take this lens with me on a trip but because we've established that it performs exactly the same as the older version of the lens optically you can see some of the processed images that i shot with that lens here and just the level of detail that you can get here when we look in the eyes it's just really nice i've never been disappointed with this lens in all the years that i've been using it and the level of sharpness in the way that it performs it's just a really lovely lens this is another image from iceland and the detail here that it's pulling out of the greens the detail in the water it's just really really nice and for me overall as a landscape wide angle zoom it's absolutely great overall then i think this is a great lens for landscape photography now i've been using the original version for five years now this has been my workhorse on every trip that i've ever been on it's i've used it in all kinds of conditions and it's never let me down and it's still going strong it has a really good focal range from 10 to 24 which gives you a lot of variety a lot of choice in the way that you frame and compose scenes it's plenty sharp it's super tough and with the addition of weather resistance in the new version it gives you a little bit of peace of mind when you're shooting in all kinds of conditions now i personally think this is a better choice than the 8016 when it comes to landscape photography it has a more flexible zoom range i tend to only take two zooms with me when i go out shooting a wide angle zoom and a telephoto zoom and the gap between 24 and the telephoto 50 it's it's perfectly manageable 8 to 16 that gets a little bit bigger and i tend to shoot a lot in that 16 to 24 millimeter range so i've really missed that it's also easier to use filters with and it's considerably lighter and smaller than the 8016 which is important to me because i do a lot of hiking i tend to be in the mountains a lot and like to go as light as possible this is a really nice compact lens so if you're looking for a wide angle zoom for your future system then i think this is the best one you can get and it's probably the best zoom lens for landscapes on the fuji system full stop however if you've got the original version i don't know if it's really worth the upgrade i don't know if i'd recommend it for that again optically you're not going to notice any difference whatsoever so your image quality is going to be just the same it does have weather ceiling but again after five years of using this without weather sealing for me that's not a deal breaker likewise the cosmetic improvements like the marked aperture ring they don't really make that much of a difference to me but if they are important to you or the weather ceiling shooting with the weather ceiling just to give you more peace of mind is important to you then sure this is really really worth it if you don't have either version and you're on a budget then i reckon you can save yourself a little bit of money and go for this don't worry too much about the weather ceiling this lens is never going to let you down but overall this is a fantastic lens which you'll get years and years and years of use out it's just it's just brilliant for landscapes and that's it for the turn to 24. next i'm going to be reviewing the 70-300 which i just received the other day so stay tuned for that and if you enjoy this video and if you like my photography and would like to join me on a workshop there are still some places on some of my workshops later on this year and next year i'm going to be announcing all kinds of workshops in places like namibia norway iceland italy so check out my website drop me a line if there's anything that you're interested in i'd love to have you along on a trip and thanks for watching if you've got any questions or comments drop them in the box below or send me an email and i'll get back to you good luck with your photography and take care see [Music]

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 51,769

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Id: D9nAXYV7Gd8

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021