quincy

Oh... this whole topic somehow didn't get my attention until now. Must have been a lovely trip, thanks for sharing your images!

I think you're right twice. I just wanted to point out which of the available lenses is closest to his wish.

Very, very nice, thanks for showing! I'm surprised by the amount of vignetting though, taking into account that it's a full frame 18 mm lens with a slow aperture. I'd keep vignetting and colour cast as it is and call it "lens character", but that's just me.

50-140 + 2x TC.

Good center sharpness at f/2.8, bad in the corners. But if you use that "shallow" depth of field, your corners don't have to be sharp most of the time anyway. Best center sharpness between f/4 and f/5.6, still good at f/8. Corner sharpness maxes out between f/5.6 and f/8. f/8 also seems to be the best compromise between depth of field, center sharpness and corner sharpness for landscape, city or other architectural stuff where you need a normal field of view. Mine is sharper than my 18-55. Enough with sharpness. If you're used to the image stabilization of your two zooms, you might get blurred images in the first weeks until you adapt to holding the camera steady or using faster shutter speeds. I don't see any real problems with chromatic aberrations, distortions, coma, purple fringing etc. It's a bit susceptible to shooting against the sun or other bright light sources. Fast but noisy autofocus motor which moves the inner lens barrel out of the lens (~5 mm) for close focusing, really small and light, smooth running but grippy focus ring, all plastic exterior, but good build quality. Aperture is also pretty audible with my sample. It was not clear to me when I bought it, but it's definitely not just a toy, it is a serious small lens, and that's why it's not as cheap as other manufacturer's pancakes.

I've added the Samyang 20/1.8. But this one does not seem to be interesting for Fuji users. We've got the 18/2, the upcoming 23/2 and Samyang's own 21 1.4 which is smaller, lighter, probably cheaper and has nine aperture blades instead of seven. /edit: just realized that the focal length axis marks are broken, will repair that as soon as I'm at home. /edit2: done.

found a nice free spot in the chart. Could become one of the more interesting third party lenses if they price it below the XF35/2.

The manufacturer is Samyang Optics Company Limited, founded 1972 in South Korea. All lenses are produced in the same factory in Masan. The other brands are just importers (Rokinon for North America, Walimex for Europe...) or trademarks. I can't tell you much about the lens itself, but I can give you two quotes:

wow!

Well, while it looks like it has no chance against the lighter, smaller, sharper and anyway stunning fuji 35/1.4, you have to admit that it has approximately one million aperture blades... thanks for sharing!

Just keep the camera turned off when you don't take a picture, uptime alone eats most of your battery. If you're not after wildlife, turning off high performance should be fine. Manual focus won't help much because fujinon x-mount is focus by wire. 3rd party manual focus lenses help with that. The rest of your measures should be fine too. Food for thought: if you turn down the brightness, your Evf or screen might be harder to see, so taking a picture takes longer, which means more uptime and more battery usage. What i'm trying to say is, don't make your life too hard and enjoy your trip.

You're welcome! I'll try to express the matter on teleconverters a bit clearer in the list as soon as I'm at home. From my point of view, I thought it was clear enough to state that a camera with the 100-400 and 2x TC loses phase detection, but you're right, I should mention that a camera with the 50-140 and 2x TC still can use phase detection. About Wildlife: The 50-140 f/2.8 becomes a 100-280 f/5.6 with the 2x TC (so 280 f/5.6 at its longest) while the 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 is a 400 f/5.6 at its longest, without TC, but still with phase detection. Or you can use it as a 280 f/5. /edit: done.

Oh my... one lens a week. I'll update the chart once the last one is out, but I'll put them into the list on a regular basis. Will those be available (quote states "released") as soon as they are being announced, or is it just the announcement? To me they look like: Cine prime, wide-to-normal prime, tele prime wide angle (or standard zoom?), aaaand... don't know. macro?

Someone could make a video of the EVF with the 1000 fps mode of the Sony RX100 IV. Then we'd know exactly what it does.

I guess that's fine. If there's anything you want to rectify, just do it. I'm neither stubborn nor offended by objection and arguments. But what I can tell you is, the 100-400 is a fine lens. I use it like a prime lens most of the time (at 400 mm) and it didn't let me down. It's very sharp focused close, and gets sharp at infinity when stopped down to f/8. When shooting static subjects, I've started to use it at ~330 mm and f/5.6 to f/8. That seems to be the sweet spot of the lens. Thanks a lot, really. I'm always nervous when bringing up the whole equivalency stuff. About the wide angles: Yep, and it only works down to about 18 mm, as you can see with the 16/1.4, 14/2.8 or the 12/2.8. Lenses with shorter focal lenghts than the flange distance need to be built retrofocal (the opposite of the tele design), which adds lenght and glass. Well, you could put them inside the camera's mount cavity alternatively, thanks to the missing mirror, but that would make them incredibly slow.

Please believe me, I don't want to annoy you... Olympus' 300/4 weighs 1.27 kg for a µ43 image circle. Nikons' Full Frame compatible AF-S Nikkor 300 MM 1:4E PF ED VR weighs 755 g. Both achieve a minimum focus distance of 1.4 m, both have VR, both use ED elements, and still the nikkor is much smaller (148 mm vs 227 mm in length) than the olympus and weighs half as much. That's probably the worst example of FF vs crop lens at the moment. If we want to compare equivalent lenses, the closest thing (since there's no 600/8 i'm aware of) would probably be canon's 400/5.6 on an APS-C body. It weighs about the same as the olympus and is approximately the same size, but then again it's a 23 year old design, and probably bigger and heavier than it needs to be with the technology we have today. If Fuji needs inspiration, they should have a look at nikons' 300/4. Don't get me wrong, I was drooling over the olympus 300/4 when it came out and was close to buying it several times while waiting for fuji's 100-400. You can use smaller cameras with the oly than with canikon lenses, and that's a big plus for me. And It's a really sharp lens. Anyway, I think we both agree Fujifilm should develop 'something' in the long telephoto prime range.

Being an APS-C lens (or mirrorless) won't help much with that focal lenght and maximum aperture. I think that has been discussed somewhere on the forum already, but I'm in the mood for it now, so everyone who does not want to read it again forgive me (or quit now): A very big chunk of the weight of fast primes are the lenses' front elements. A 200/2 lens always needs a front element with at least 100 mm (+ a bit) diameter, no matter what the format of the sensor/film in the camera is. If you look at the AF-S Nikkor 200 MM 1:2G ED VRII, for example, you can see that behind the thin, flat protective glass element in the front, there are 3 giant, thick lens elements (2x ED convex,1x normal concave), which can't be reduced in size. Those three lens elements alone are probably responsible for 1/3 of the nikkor's weight. (They should be about 10, 20 & 15 mm thick and have a diameter of about 100 mm, roughly estimated) They have to remain their size because of the way light travels through the lens. There's a nice image on wikipedia that I'd like to borrow for this explanation. I know it's a microscope and not the nikkor's structure, but nearly every (photographic) lens works the same way, and due to the microscopic nature, the object plane is close to the front element which helps a lot with visualising the explanation: (source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/Microscope-optical_path.svg/2000px-Microscope-optical_path.svg.png ) Take a look at the lower marginal ray (green). This describes the path of the light from the lowest outermost point in a real scene the camera can "see". You can see that every point (in the real scene) reflects light in every direction. All the light that is reflected towards the front element of the lens, up to a certain point where the incident angle becomes too flat, is now collected by the front element, thrown somehow through the whole lens and focused back to one single point on the sensor. This means, if you reduce the size of the front elements, you gather less light for each single pixel instead of cropping the frame, which makes the lens slower, no matter how big the aperture is. You can, however, reduce the size of some lens elements deeper in the lens. The thing is, they are a lot (!) smaller already, so you don't save much weight by that. (again, the picture does not represent the 200/2s structure) I don't remember if the Canikon 200/2 are real telephoto designs, but if they are not Fujifilm could spare some weight by building their's as one and reduce the lenght of the lens body (and compensate for their shorter flange distance, which would have required the lens to be longer than the Canikons). But again, not much to be saved there, and it would probably demands more glass, which compensates for the lighter lens body. With all that said, I think Fujifilm could make their APS-C 200/2 a bit lighter than the FF 200/2s, but I don't think they can shave off more than those 300 - 400 g I mentioned earlier. (well, of course I hope I'm wrong). Fuji's own 100-400 is an example of this: 1.37 kg vs 1,5 kg for the FF counterparts. The often praised APS-C size advantage comes into play when you compare an APS-C system with a FF system that gives you the same angle of view. (200 mm vs 300 mm, and so on). But most people, although realizing and acknowledging the DOF difference between a 200/2.8 on APS-C and a 300/2.8 on FF, don't take into account that the ISO rating already compensates the loss of light every pixel has in the APS-C system vs. the FF system. That's good, because this way, ISO, shutter speed and aperture can be used globally and interchangeable, and that is also important for flash photography. But the size and weight saving of an APS-C system is bought by higher shot noise (worse signal-noise-ratio). This can be partly compensated by faster lenses, like Fujifilm did in the past (and only up to the limit of the full well capacity, limiting dynamic range). But then, your APS-C lenses are just shorter and fatter than your FF lenses. Knowing that sensor developement marches on with great steps, I still think Fujifilm did the right thing with chosing APS-C. But one can't just ignore the fact that a FF sensor of the same generation will always offer better noise performance and a larger full well capacity. Uuh.. well, I think I started to blabber in the last paragraph. Please pardon me, it's late where I live.

Updated list&chart with the data from the new roadmap.

The 200/2 would weigh about 2.2-2.5 kg*. That would sum up to 2.4-2.7 kg with the XF2X TC WR for a 400/4 (only one stop faster than the 100-400 on the long end, and that's 1.3 kg). So, for better image quality, yes, I'm with you. And I'd also like to have a few tele primes, e.g. the cancelled 120 macro or this 200/2. But it wouldn't be light. *Canon's 200/2 is 2.54 kg, Nikon's is 2.93 kg.

It never was on the official roadmap. Just rumors, like the 33/1.

That's really beautiful! Did you "help" the bokeh, or was that the 56 on it's own?

I'd like that. But I guess we'll need to wait for Fuji to implement it. I'd also like a simple 'chosen shutter speed or higher' functionality in the quick menu.

Heh, my T70 rewound film very fast... and it was economic too, because of the partly automated loading procedure I was often able to get two or three extra exposures per roll. Aaah, memories. However, this is about batteries. So far, I've never needed more than three batteries, and they are small. I just put them in a pocket and forget about them until I need to swap. And of course the battery life depends on the way you shoot. Usually, I'm able to get ~300 shots out of one battery. If I'm after fast moving animals like birds, squirrels, hare etc., I tend to overshoot (CH + AF-C until the buffer is full)), and that way I've got more than 800 shots out of one battery on several occasions. When I'm out for landscape- or astrophotography, I tend to use the screen a lot, and compose more carefully. In daylight, the screen brightness needs to be increased. At night, the exposures themselves take longer. All this eats up batteries. But again, I don't think that carrying two spares is unacceptable. If it is unbearable somehow, a battery grip or a different camera should be considered. About the zoom-thingie mentioned earlier: When setting the OIS to mode 2 the energy consumption is not that bad. At least I don't see a noticeable difference between the 18-55 and the 27.

The MOG Trimagon – f2,6 95 mm has finally been released.

Just to conclude: My camera came back today. The log says: "parts repaired: - lens mount - casing parts replaced: - grips" The lens mount is now nice and firm, even the formerly very loose sitting Samyang 12/2 clicks in place with a satisfying 'clonk' and has only minimum rotational play. My XF 27 needs gentle force to be mounted and sits absolutely tight. Very nice improvement. I don't know what they had to repair on the casing, but I think I'm happy they did it, whatever it was. All the rubber parts have been exchanged, except for one small piece on the upper left side. The new door now closes tight and does not bulge. The new rubber parts are a lot harder and have a rougher surface than the old ones. I can compare that directly, since they left this one piece alone. Feels more like plastic now, the old one feels like rubber, but of course it might just have aged. So, in total I paid... nothing. It seems that I, somehow, bought an extended 2-year no-questions-asked-warranty with my camera (demo sample). Lucky me. Oh, and the camera already had the newest firmware installed when it came back! All in all, I have to say that Fujifilm's customer service left me with a very positive experience, and I think even if I would have had to pay for it (which I expected), I'd be happy now.