Review of Fujifilm XF 16mm f/1.4 R WR Lens

The Fuji 16mm is a highly anticipated lens that I was excited to get my hands on. All Fuji lenses are exceptional quality, and this lens is no exception.

The build quality of this lens is absolutely fantastic, it is solid metal which balances perfectly on the X-T1. As you can see there is a tightly spaced focus scale when you slip the focus ring into manual mode, I found the scale to be accurate when using the hyperfocal settings, the focus ring has a nice fluid feel to it and is extremely easy to get sharp focus.

I found the aperture ring a bit too easy to turn, I often found myself inadvertenly changing the aperture while carrying the camera around. My only other issue is the focus scale not showing on the LCD like the zoom lenses, I believe this is common with the primes.

The bokeh of this lens is smooth, silky, and beautiful. The close focusing distance is less than 6 Incredible sharpness throughout the scene. Taken at f/8

More bokeh at f/1.4 More bokeh at f/1.4

I know many will be looking here to see how it performs for night photography, I am happy to say that it performs quite well.

Below are crops to show the coma and sharpness. Note that I failed to change the focus when I changed the aperture, so you will notice that it is very sharp at f/1.4 (what I used to focus) but not at f/2 and f/2.8, that is how delicate the focus is for this lens. I assure you the lens is sharp at f/2 and f/2.8, the bigger concern is coma at these apertures.

You can see in the upper right corner there almost no coma at f/1.4 and clears up at f/2. In the center of the frame there is a slight amount of chromatic abberation, which begins to clear up at f/2. The biggest surprise was to see the coma in the upper left corner, at f/1.4 it is significant and mostly clears up at f/2. This may be a case of a bad lens, but I cannot say for sure. It should be noted that this is a very small area of the image, it could easily be cropped out or cleaned up in Photoshop.

Overall I was very pleased with this lens for night photography and would recommend it. It would be best used at f/2.0, which is typical with f/1.4 lenses like the Rokinon 24mm. The color rendition is very good with lots of color in the stars.

I really enjoyed using this lens and would highly recommend it to my fellow Fuji shooters.

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About the author David Kingham

David is a professional landscape and nature photographer originally from Loveland, Colorado who is now traveling the American West full-time in an RV with his photography and life partner Jennifer Renwick, and their two cats. David has published an eBook called Nightscape and has in-depth videos on post-processing. David and his partner Jennifer Renwick find joy in teaching others photography in their photography workshops, and through their blog.

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  1. I sent this lens back because of the extreme coma on Astrophotography. Maybe I got a bad one as well but the whole point of paying for f1.4 was to use it at that aperture. Otherwise, for the sake of 2mm focal length, I might as well use the 18-55 f2.8 kit lens which has no coma. For this kind of money, I think we can expect better. I also have my doubts about the bokeh on this lens – it looks fine on your first (close up) sample but look again at the distance on the (portrait format) sample of the mossy tree, that looks horrible. I see this a lot in Fujinon lenses where out of focus areas have an ugly, double image, motion blur appearance.

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