Review on 📸 VILTROX 85mm F1.8 Mark II STM Lens: Auto Focus, Large Aperture Telephoto Portrait Lens for Fuji X-Mount Cameras by Trey Harvey

Although I was a professional photographer for 40 years before retirement, I always have Pentax, original Nikon lenses or Fuji ones usually the best of their kind. I was pleasantly surprised with this lens from the moment I opened the box until I spent three full days testing it. Here's what I found: Build quality: I've owned over 40 lenses in my career, including lenses under $6,000. I was blown away by the construction of this lens, which was as good as anything I've owned and far better than some of the latest plastic lenses. It is made from beautifully crafted and machined metal with minimal plastic content. The focus is buttery smooth. The chrome-plated brass lens mount is highly polished, so it can be attached to the camera very well. The lens elements are firmly fixed in place, and anything you see through the front lens in the lens (and there are many of those) is suitably anti-glare coated. Handling: Due to this solid construction, this lens is quite heavy. It's best to shoot with the lens in your left hand and the camera and controls in your right hand. The lens has no aperture ring; Aperture is controlled using the front dial. It actually works well because it's easy to change aperture this way with your right hand while your left hand holds the lens. Bat-shaped focus ring, but manual focus is easy because the focus ring is very large. So big, in fact, that I've found that disabling "AF/MF" in the menu helps prevent you from accidentally switching to manual focus. This lens does not have image stabilization and is not weather resistant. Image quality: • Autofocus performance was perfect: fast, quiet and accurate on my X-T2 • Sharpness and contrast: wide open, although f2.2 is in the center of the frame. The image was very sharp, with corners and edges a bit less sharp. This is appropriate as most shots taken at this aperture are likely to be portraits with the edges blurred. From about f4 to f11 the whole image has very good sharpness and contrast, so it can be used for landscapes if you reduce the aperture a bit. At a larger aperture, there was some chromatic aberration around the edges, but this is easily corrected in post-processing • Bokeh. Bokeh, the out-of-focus part of the image, is very important to most photographers who buy a large, long focal length lens. Length lens. It works to isolate your subject, adding a romantic element to the picture and making it clear that the picture was not taken with a smartphone. The degree of bokeh is determined by the focal length, aperture and distance of the subject from the background. The quality of the bokeh is determined by the design of the lens. In short, the bokeh on this lens is amazing. It's smooth and creamy with no jams or double vision. It's as good as any other Fuji lens I own. Conclusion: This is not an all-round lens and not one that I would take as the sole lens when traveling. So my 5 star rating is based on someone using this lens for what it excels at. A fast lens with an equivalent focal length of 122mm is excellent for portraits if you have a sufficient working distance due to the good perspective and the ability to isolate the subject. It is also suitable for landscape shots when the subject is at a distance. Because of its weight and size, this isn't the best lens for hiking or traveling with a single lens. But its overall performance is almost on par with most lenses that cost two to three times as much, so it's incredible value for money and highly recommended.