Fujifilm Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R Lens Review

Fujifilm Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R Performance

At maximum aperture, sharpness in the centre of the frame already reaches outstanding levels and clarity towards the edges of the frame approaches very good levels.

Stopping down to f/5.6 results in extremely high levels of clarity in the centre of the frame and excellent sharpness towards the edges of the frame.

Resolution at 14mm

How to read our charts The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column. The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple. For this review, the lens was tested on a Fujifilm X-Pro1 using Imatest.

Chromatic aberrations are extremely well controlled, barely exceeding half a pixel width as the lens is stopped down beyond f/8. This extremely low level should be difficult to spot, even in images with high contrast towards the edges of the frame.

Chromatic aberration at 14mm

How to read our charts Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Severe chromatic aberration gives a noticeable fringing or a halo effect around sharp edges within the picture. It can be cured in software. Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. For this review, the lens was tested on a Fujifilm X-Pro1 using Imatest.

As might be expected from an ultra-wide angle lens with a moderately fast maximum aperture, falloff of illumination towards the corners at f/2.8 is quite noticeable. Here the corners are 2.36 stops darker than the image centre and visually uniform illumination  isn't achieved until the lens is stopped down to f/8 or beyond.

Distortion is remarkably low for an ultra-wide angle lens. Imatest could only detect 0.15% barrel distortion, which is a negligible amount.

A petal shaped hood comes supplied as standard with the lens, which does a decent job of protecting the front element from extraneous light that may cause flare. A slight loss of contrast can be seen when shooting into the light at wide apertures, but otherwise this lens is very resistant to flare.

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