Review by Klaus Schroiff, published January 2015

Introduction

Fujifilm always emphasized high build quality and this lens is no exception to the rule. In fact we'd even place it a little ahead of the Fujinon lenses that we tested so far. The lens body is tightly assembled and mostly made of metal. The zoom and focus control rings are rubberized and operate smoothly. The physical length remains constant regardless of the zoom or focus action although the inner zoom barrel moves a little bit. Typical for all Fujinon lenses, there's a dedicated aperture ring with distinctive, albeit unmarked 1/3 steps. If you move it from A (=Automatic) to a specific f-stop the camera will turn automatically into aperture priority or manual mode (depending on the settings of the shutter speed dial). The optical image stabilizer can also be activated on the lens. A large plastic lens hood is also part of the package. While we are quite enthusiastic about the quality of the execution, we would like to raise at least on concern - the Fujinon is neither smaller nor more light-weight than an APS-C DSLR lens. Actually by now it's a viable conclusion that Fujifilm isn't playing the size game at all (unlike Sony or Micro-Four-Thirds).

The lens features an internal AF micro-motor. This incarnation is almost noiseless and pretty fast. As usual manual focusing works "by wire" thus by triggering the AF motor. However, it has clearly one of the better implementations here. It is also worth to point out that the Fujinon can focus down to 24cm (max. magnification 1:6.25) which is better than most in its class. There is no focus distance guidance on the lens but Fujifilm provides this information (including the depth-of-field) via the camera viewfinder/on the LCD. Regarding the OIS (optical image stabilizer) Fujifilm claims an efficiency of up to 3 f-stops. This may be true for lab conditions but better be a bit conservative here.