Fujifilm 10-24mm f4 R OIS review

My favorite lens for any camera is the super-wide zoom. I own three super-wide lenses—two for my Nikon and one for my Fuji XT1. When I started carrying the Fuji XT1 around, I missed having the wide zoom so much. I had the Fujifilm XF 18mm prime lens, but I disliked using it, so I bought this lovely piece of glass to carry around in my camera bag all day.

he lens box: All the prime lenses that I have bought until now have had great packaging. This box is a more standard affair, and the packaging is like any Nikon, Sigma, or Tamron lens. Nothing special or interesting to look at.

The lens looks a little big on the camera, but it is well-balanced and never feels front-heavy. This is important for a lens that is going to be used a lot.

This lens is not cheap and costs about the same as a super-wide lens for a DSLR. It is hard to justify spending so much money on a lens that is not for work, but I use this focal zoom range so much that I eventually pulled the trigger and ordered a copy of the lens. Over the course of 2015, it has become one of my most used lenses for my Fuji XT1. Just have a look at my metadata for 2015.

The Fujifilm XF 10-24 F4 R OIS lens is the most used lens on my Fuji XT1. I love the super-wide viewpoint and this lens is just so good.

This lens is much smaller than my Nikon equivalent lens, but the body is constructed of metal and weighs about the same as the Nikon 16-35 f/4 lens. It feels solid and heavy, but not beastly heavy like the Tamron 15-30 f/2.8. I love the build quality that Fujifilm has in their lenses. The lens is a little large compared to the prime lenses, but it feels well-balanced on the Fujifilm XT1 body.

Standing next to its brothers, the Fujifilm XF 10-24 f/4 lens is towered over by the Nikon and Tamron lenses. The Fujifilm lens weighs about the same as its bigger Nikon counterpart but is completely dwarfed by the chunky Tamron lens.

The lens comes with a plastic lens hood, and it does its job well. I have no complaints about the lens hood, but I do wish it was metal like many of the prime lenses that Fuji usually ships with. However, a lens is much more than just its physical appearance; how it shoots is the most important thing.

The very first shot I took with the lens was just as the sun was setting. It arrived late in the evening, so I quickly ran to a little creek, shot this off the bridge, and then hurried home to view it on my computer. It was love at first sight with this lens.

The Fujifilm 10-24mm f/4 R OIS lens has that Fuji magic that almost all their lenses have. Simply great optics with punchy colors and sharp as hell. Because I knew this lens would be used very often, I put it through the wringer with tests. I shot a lot of scenes with this lens in the one year that I’ve had it, and it has never disappointed me.

I have shot this lens in the snow a few times now and used extremely slow shutter speeds. The OIS is really good on this lens and I can get sharp shots at 1 second fairly consistently.

This lens has produced some of my favorite images of all time. I use this lens constantly, and it never fails to deliver. The OIS is incredible; I can shoot handheld up to one second. The focus is good and fast in both good light and poor light. It does not flare and has very little chromatic aberration. One of the negatives of shooting with such a wide-angle lens is that you get very little bokeh or out-of-focus areas. The lens has a minimum focal distance of 0.24m to objects, and with that wide angle of view and the minimum aperture of f/4, almost everything is in focus. Shooting objects so close to the camera means you can get some interesting shots, but being so wide means that it will distort things a little.

One thing I noticed about this lens, is that I have almost no missed focused shots when using it in normal conditions.

Shooting into the sun again and the lens delivered exactly what I wanted.

The Fujifilm XF 10-24mm f/4 lens is a constant aperture lens with a minimum aperture of f/4. While it is not the fastest super-wide zoom lens on the market, it is more than acceptable as a normal carry-around lens. There are some rumors suggesting that this lens is actually an f/2.8 lens that is stopped down to f/4 by Fujifilm’s software because the lens is too soft at f/2.8. This seems to be true, as there are videos on YouTube showing people who have tricked the lens to open the aperture beyond f/4, but this really doesn’t concern or interest me. The lens is sharp in the center at f/4, but some of the corners are slightly softer. It is still acceptably sharp in the corners, but if you like to pixel peep, you will notice it. Stop the lens down to f/5.6, and the corners sharpen up nicely, making the image sharp from corner to corner. I have shot a lot of landscapes with this lens recently, and at f/8, you will not find any weaknesses in the images it produces.

Small creek in China.

Focusing this lens manually is a pain. This lens still uses focus-by-wire like all of the Fujifilm lenses that I have tested, and I absolutely hate this. To me, this is an autofocus lens only, as manual focus is just too painful to use. The same has to be said about the aperture ring. It is an electronic aperture ring, and there are no markings on the aperture ring, so you have no idea what aperture setting is until you look into the viewfinder or the back of the LCD screen. The aperture ring is also too loose, in my opinion, and it is very easy to bump the aperture ring while walking around. This happened to me a few times while this lens and camera were hanging on my hip from a Blackrapid camera strap. This is such a design flaw and it hurts this lens so much. But that is about the only negative I can say about this lens. I am really nit-picking to come up with some negatives because, overall, I think this is a fantastic lens to own and use.

Even though this lens is big compared to the Fujifilm primes lens that I own, it is still a small lens and it is easy to use as a walk-around lens. Whenever I go to a touristy place, this is the lens I put onto my camera.

Shooting in low light with this lens is really a dream. I am consistently surprised at how slow I can set the shutter speed and still get sharp results.

This lens is stunning, and when comparing it to its bigger brothers on the Nikon and Tamron side, the Fujifilm 10-24mm f/4 R OIS lens is just as sharp as the Nikon 16-35mm lens but just a tad softer than the Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens. The OIS is much better than Nikon’s system but just a little behind the Tamron lens (Tamron has one of the best image stabilization systems out there. It consistently outperforms all my Nikon lenses in this regard).

A snapshot in Shanghai when visiting one of the museums there.

Jinshan Park

At the beginning of the 2015 music season, my Nikon 16-35mm f/4 lens fell apart on me at a music festival. During this festival, I decided to use my Fujifilm XT1 with the Fujifilm 10-24mm f/4 R OIS lens as a replacement to shoot the crowds. To be honest, as much as I loved this lens, I had mixed results when working with it at a professional level, and we will go over some of them here.

Using the tilt screen on the Fuji XT1, you can get some interesting shots with this lens.

My primary reason for using a super-wide angle zoom is to shoot the crowd.

The autofocus was great in my daily shooting, but it let me down once I started shooting the crowds at the shows I was working at. The lens and the Fuji XT1 really struggled in low light compared to the Nikon DSLR and the Nikon or Tamron lenses. I consistently had missed focus shots; I guess only 1 in every 5 photos was in focus. Such a low percentage of in-focus shots in the pit when shooting is completely unacceptable, so I eventually had to buy the Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 lens to replace my Nikon lens. I really liked the idea of shooting with the Fujifilm XT1 and this lens—it weighs less than half of my Nikon with its lens attached—but the results just weren’t there. Maybe as mirrorless cameras improve, this lens might be a viable option, but as it stands in 2016, it is still not good enough for my type of work in photography.

The lens still delivered good results on stationary objects though. The lens performed well and there was very little flaring under all the stage lights.

Flaring was really well controlled with this lens. I consistently shot it wide open because of the low light conditions that I generally work with, and I never had any problems with flares at all. Fuji really knows how to design excellent lenses.

This is the kind of shot I took a lot, but the number of missed focus shots from this lens and the Fuji XT1 was unacceptable to me. Between songs, the crowds usually had enough light on them to make focusing not too difficult, but with the Fuji system and this lens, I was consistently getting out-of-focus shots.

Shooting performers on stage, the lens focuses much faster but shooting like this is a pain because of the EVF on the Fujifilm XT1.

For shooting in everyday life, this lens is great and is my most used Fujifilm lens. I take it with me everywhere, and it always gives me great results. For work, it’s a mixed bag, and it forced me to buy a new lens for my Nikons. I cannot just blame the lens for that, though—the mirrorless system is just not really capable of working well for my type of work. I still love this lens for my daily life, and I would not trade it for any of the wide primes that Fuji offers.

Pray ribbons at the temple

If you are serious about your Fuji gear, and this is your main camera system, then this lens is a must-buy. It delivers everything that you could want from a lens. It is sharp in the center, though the corners are a little soft at f/4, but not terribly so. The lens has great contrast, focuses fast, and is small enough to carry in any bag.

Shooting any kind of tourist shot with this lens in China is so easy because of the wide angle that it offers. This is the only lens I take with me into any of the parks here in China.

The lens is a little expensive but it is a great lens and all super wide zooms are expensive, to be honest. I cannot recommend this lens any more strongly than this lens. If I could only take one lens with me on holiday, then this is the lens I would choose.

Rating

Image Quality: 5 out of 5
Focus speed: 4.5 out of 5
Build quality: 4 out of 5