Review on 📷 Fujifilm XF 35mm F2 R WR Lens - Black by Chris Pollreisz

UPDATE 09/03/2019: I've tried this lens again after having success with other Japan-made copies of Fujicron. Sometime in 2017 or later, Fujifilm moved production of this lens to the Philippines and gave it a new product number. There may also have been a silent lens upgrade, but I can't confirm that for sure. What I do know is that the old "Made in Japan" version works a little better. It appears to be better built visually, with less off-center softness and decentering. The corners are still not very good, but they are much better and at f/5.6 the image is very sharp across the frame. Center sharpness is always great and still shows that weird effect between f/2.8 and f/4 where the middle part of the frame softens a bit when you stop. I chose this second one, love the contrast this lens shows - it reminds me a lot of my old Contax Zeiss lenses. smaller holes. Great contrast drawing! Fast and quiet autofocus motor. Small, light and well built. It has a nice soft bokeh character. Excellent resistance to glare and ghosting. CONS: Lots of vignetting and distortion in raw files. Bokeh can sometimes show onion rings. Edges and corners are never sharp, they get even worse when you close the aperture. Also, the high-resolution center circle gets smaller, not larger, as the aperture is closed. This is the opposite of any other lens I've had. I ran a few tests to make sure I wasn't going crazy, but that's how the lens behaves. A review on Lenstip confirms this behavior. CONCLUSION: I think Fuji sacrificed too much to make this lens so small. The optics should be bigger/different to compensate for the loss of resolution at the edges. I wouldn't mind if it was a bit bigger, more like a 23mm f/2 size if that meant the lens had to be sharp. This lens has almost become a winner for me. I'm sticking with the f/1.4 version as it has no issues with sharp corners/edges.