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FUJIFILM will develop an XF 8-16mmF2.8 WR lens


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so, if we “ vote” yes, they will develop it and if we vote not they won’t?

 

:)

 

Seriously, to me no lens can be wide-angle enough so, great idea if they want to renovate their range subtracting a few millimeters and adding WR to a lens, why not.

 

Having an autofocus lens in this range will be absolutely pointless but it wil probably turn out to be the quickest (and most useless) AF in the range.

 

I am not in the market for this lens.

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I discovered that I have an extreme wide angle lens I did not recognise. It might be useful to know for anyone who has this lens.

 

I have the Samyang 8mm fisheye. A few days back, I noticed that Adobe Camera RAW has a profile for it on an X-camera. Clicked to see what would happen and it was rendered as rectilinear. It pretty much retains the short side, but crops a bit on the long side. No idea what focal length is the equivalent, but clearly all the problems of shooting super-wide are there. If the camera is tilted, the foreshortening is dramatic. With the camera straight with the world, lines are straight and perspective is profound.

 

DXP14811-HDR.jpg

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...and in any case, despite rumors in that sense, since Fuji is not (yet?) compatible with Sigma, lenses, so, methinks that what Sigma or any other make of universal autofocus lenses does, affects Fuji only in a marginal and mostly theoretical way ( would a client go for Fuji BECASE they can use a SIGMA lens with it... I doubt it!)!

 

As for a stabilized autofocus 8-16mm we shall see what it really does. In my experience (I love wideangles) zooming between these two focal lenses will not be extremely useful.

 

Interesting that your Camera Raw version features a correction for the 8mm samyang. I have one but my  LR 5.7 doesn’t have that with a X camera.

 

Can I bypass that? Can I upgrade Camera Raw only and add functionalities to my older LR?

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I believe Fuji will create an 8 - 16/2.8 lens to have that 'holy trinity' that the established competition has.  It would be another step in the direction to sway working pro's from full frame to their system.  It is just a matter of when do they do it?  I can see it being not high on the priority list because I would expect a small market would actually purchase a specialized lens like that.

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I discovered that I have an extreme wide angle lens I did not recognise. It might be useful to know for anyone who has this lens.

 

I have the Samyang 8mm fisheye. A few days back, I noticed that Adobe Camera RAW has a profile for it on an X-camera. Clicked to see what would happen and it was rendered as rectilinear. It pretty much retains the short side, but crops a bit on the long side. No idea what focal length is the equivalent, but clearly all the problems of shooting super-wide are there. If the camera is tilted, the foreshortening is dramatic. With the camera straight with the world, lines are straight and perspective is profound.

 

DXP14811-HDR.jpg

Wow....I kinda prefer the uncorrected version. The corrected one just makes me dizzy! :D

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Would rather see a "budget" UWA lens to go with the 18-55 f/2.8-f/4  :)

Maybe something like 10-18 f/4

You are aware that they do have a 10-24 F4 right ? And that lens is not THAT expensive compared to the quality of it. Making a cheaper 10-18 F4 lens would be rather detrimental to their whole lens line up.

 

The XF mount is really still quite young, they can't really afford to make lenses that would overlap other for no good reason, except being cheaper. The XC lens line, while very well received, is not selling that well compared to the much better XF lenses.

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Premium/Pro primes zooms

 

8-16 f/2.8 (rumored)

16-55 f/2.8

50-140 f/2.8

 

 

Enthusiast/light weight zooms

 

10-18 f/3.5-4.8 (me guessing)

18-55 f/2.8-4

55-200 f/3.5-4.8

 

 

Premium/Pro primes

 

16 f/1.4

23 f/1.4 or upcoming 33 f/1.0 (rumored)

56 f/1.4

 

 

Enthusiast/light weight primes

 

18 f/2

23 f/2 (rumored) or 35 f/2

50 f/2 (rumored)

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I'm not a big fan of the ultra wide angle lens, they just don't do it for me. Although I do have the the 16mm 1.4 which is about equivalent to a 24mm in full frame and I find this does just about everything in the wide angle department for me. I changed to Fuji to cut down on a bag full of lenses so for me this is enough. It's easy to get carried away with I need this I need that but do we really need it ? How many times have we photographers lusted after the must have lens only to find it sits in the bag most of the time! We are a fickle bunch!

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Despite 16mm being a very useful wide focal length, there is a world of difference in going much wider than that 

 

 

Whether one likes it or not is again another thing but that there is a substantial difference between a picture shot at 10mm  (let alone 8) and one shot at 16 is a fact. Perhaps not quite so evident in a simple landscape shot but it is in many other situation.

 

If this weren’t the case, the folks who buy a 10-24 (I had one for more than a year) would not notice any difference between 10mm and 16mm (both on this zoom) and I tell you, they do!

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Their premium zoom trinity is about to be complete!

 

8-16 f/2.8

16-55 f/2.8

50-140 f/2.8

 They could sell all three as a special edition set with matching serial numbers.  Pack them in a custom leather covered, silk lined Pelican case.  Let's see Leica beat that!

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I think that this lens is an extremely important proof of concept design. An 8-16mm Fuji XF lens would help demonstrate that the Fuji X mount is a highly capable mount that can convincingly support a f/2.8 zoom trinity going from 8-16mm, 16-55mm up to 50-140mm. 

 

This Fuji wide angle zoom lens will be the full frame equivalent of a 12-24mm full frame lens, which would compete against the likes of the Canon 11-24mm f/4.0 lens and the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens. If it performs well, the Fuji wide-angle f/2.8 zoom would constitute a resounding assertion of the ability of the X mount to cater to a full range of focal lengths required for full professional usage. Most importantly, Fuji would be throwing down the gauntlet to Sony, challenging them to come up with a comparable f/2.8 wide angle zoom for their full frame mirrorless FE mount. 

 

The trouble is that Sony would likely be unable to fire back with a full frame mirrorless wide angle fast zoom. The reason can be found in this diagram:

 

flange-focal-distance-and-angle-of-incid

 

Fuji themselves have stated that:

 

...the angle of light that film and imaging sensors can receive differ from each other. Film can receive light at the slanted angle of up to 45 degrees without any problem, but in case of the digital camera, the light needs to be as perpendicular to the sensor as possible. Slanted angle light causes mixed colors and therefore the real colors sometimes cannot be reproduced. In order to receive the light perpendicular to the sensor, it is important to make the rear glass element on each lens as big as possible to put the light beams parallel from the outlet of the light to the sensor.

 

https://fujifilm-blog.com/2015/06/30/interview-with-mr-takashi-ueno-from-fujifilm-tokyo-why-dont-fujifilm-make-full-frame-dslr/

 

The problem with the Sony E mount is that it was originally intended to be an APS-C mount, and it has an 18mm flange distance largely identical to that of the Fuji X mount (17.8mm), and Canon EF-M mount (18mm). What Sony did was to take an APS-C mount and use it as the basis of a full frame mount. That is the reason why the angle of incidence of light in the corners become unusually steep, as shown in the above diagram. This will likely limit the ability of engineers to develop quality lenses wider than about 18mm especially since the angle of incidence increases with ultra wide angle lenses. Here is how the mathematics of it work out:

 
Where X2 = Rear element distance from sensor. Y2 = 1/2 distance of diagonal measure of sensor.  We then derive the Tangent of A°2:
 
Tan A°2 = Y2 / X2
Tan A°2 = ~21.63mm / 18mm flange distance = ~1.202 = ~50.2°
 
Therefore maximum FOV @ 18mm flange optic distance = 2 x 50.2° or ~100.4°, or, roughly, the FOV of an 18mm lens.
 

The reason why maximum apertures for the E mount primes are commonly limited to around f/1.8 may also be to avoid exposing acutance problems in the corners. When the maximum aperture is increased to f/1.4, the engineers need to make the lens larger to overcome the corner problems. This causes a blowout in the lens size on ultra wide aperture models without necessarily resulting in better performance compared to their DSLR peers (the 85mm f/1.4 GM lens has MTF plots similar to the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 lens, and thus by extrapolation a performance similar to the now discontinued Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM lens despite its greater size). 

 

As it stands already, the Sony Vario-Tessar T* FE 16-35mm F4 ZA OSS has severe corner problems at the 16mm end. To achieve the 16mm focal length on the FE 16-35mm f/4, Zeiss were forced to deploy a double concave lens element on the sensor-side to adequately project the image so as to cover the full surface of the sensor. If the maximum aperture were increased to f/2.8, the corner problems would become even worse. That means we may never see a decently performing 16-35mm f/2.8 E mount zoom lens, and a 12-24mm f/2.8 zoom is even less likely. Even an acceptably high performance full frame 14-24mm f/2.8 lens like the Nikon version is probably impossible to execute acceptably on the E mount. 

 

Sony fanboys will gurgle and froth at the mouth on reading this, but these are mathematical limits dictated entirely by the physics of the mount. It is a functional limit everyone has to accept when you have a full frame mirrorless system based on an APS-C dimension mount. It matters little how upset Sony fanboys get with me for pointing these inconvenient facts out. They can say what they please, but the only way these theoretical limits can be decisively disproven is by Sony producing a high-performance full frame 12-24mm f/2.8 zoom, a 14-24mm f/2.8 zoom, or at the very least, a 16-35mm f/2.8 GM zoom. Sony are welcome to go ahead and prove me wrong. I will be only to pleased if they could overcome this critical hurdle, and since I also shoot on the Sony E mount I will consider buying such a lens. But as you can see I have very good cause to be immensely sceptical.

 

So the Fuji 8-16mm f/2.8 will be an extremely important lens that will showcase what the X-mount is capable of. It will put immense pressure on Sony to show that their rival full frame E mount is a similarly professional grade lens mount. After all what kind of a lens mount would it be if it cannot support the full f/2.8 zoom trinity? It matters not in the slightest if some do not shoot at ultra wide angles. The more critical factor is the proof of concept that a mount is capable of supporting a full range of focal lens for a wide variety of applications. Although the proof is in the eating, the physics of it predicts that it is a challenge the X mount will probably pass, just as the E mount will equally likely fail—and fail dismally.

 

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