Good video! When I started my photography journey I did fall for it. I purchased lenses because I thought I needed them, then decided I needed a “better” lens because of some review etc. I have ended up with 20+ lenses, about 50% autofocus and 50% manual. Today, I would be fine with 4 primes. I am also a big Fuji fan, have a Leica Q2 and the rarest of all. - a Pixii (thanks for the videos). Give me 2 Voigtlander/Leica lenses and 2 Fuji autofocus primes and I’m good. All the noise about better lenses/cameras can be ignored unless the photographer is making a living from it and absolutely has to have certain features to meet the client demands.
Very nice video, as always, and very true. I tried a Leica 1, Model A, which is almost 100 years old and manual everything. The results were excellent and nobody would guess.
Back in the film days, most amateur photographers would print their 35mm photos to a size of 8 x 10 inches. If the picture was really good, 11 x 14 inches and if they really liked that photo, they may have gone to a 16 x 20 enlargement. Most brand name lenses closed down to f8 with the camera on a tripod would produce an acceptably sharp image. I once tested a new lens for sharpness and started blowing up the image on my computer screen and thought it was not as sharp as I expected until I realised that if I had printed it, it would have measured 5 x 7.5 feet! That lens was super sharp for any use I had!
True. Sharpness is usually the only thing that the reviewers can safely and consistently quantify without leaving their office, so that's what they have traditionally focused on, and that has turned into a culture over time. In reality, prime lenses became practically flawless for most use cases almost 40 years ago, and zoom lenses have been like that for the last 15 or so years. Of course there is still big differences between them depending on how much you spend, but in majority of cases, most viewers will not notice those differences on screen or on medium sized prints.
Yeah, DPreview really missed the point of this lens and owe it a proper review. Fujifilm makes plenty of $4k--$99k cinema lenses and other $500-$2000 XF XC zooms that'll all beat the XF 18-120 in some area or another, but I can't think of any that'll deliver as much across the full spectrum of general travel zoom and videography scenarios as this lens can.
Good video! When I started my photography journey I did fall for it. I purchased lenses because I thought I needed them, then decided I needed a “better” lens because of some review etc. I have ended up with 20+ lenses, about 50% autofocus and 50% manual. Today, I would be fine with 4 primes. I am also a big Fuji fan, have a Leica Q2 and the rarest of all. - a Pixii (thanks for the videos). Give me 2 Voigtlander/Leica lenses and 2 Fuji autofocus primes and I’m good. All the noise about better lenses/cameras can be ignored unless the photographer is making a living from it and absolutely has to have certain features to meet the client demands.
Very nice video, as always, and very true. I tried a Leica 1, Model A, which is almost 100 years old and manual everything. The results were excellent and nobody would guess.
Back in the film days, most amateur photographers would print their 35mm photos to a size of 8 x 10 inches. If the picture was really good, 11 x 14 inches and if they really liked that photo, they may have gone to a 16 x 20 enlargement. Most brand name lenses closed down to f8 with the camera on a tripod would produce an acceptably sharp image. I once tested a new lens for sharpness and started blowing up the image on my computer screen and thought it was not as sharp as I expected until I realised that if I had printed it, it would have measured 5 x 7.5 feet! That lens was super sharp for any use I had!
True. Sharpness is usually the only thing that the reviewers can safely and consistently quantify without leaving their office, so that's what they have traditionally focused on, and that has turned into a culture over time. In reality, prime lenses became practically flawless for most use cases almost 40 years ago, and zoom lenses have been like that for the last 15 or so years. Of course there is still big differences between them depending on how much you spend, but in majority of cases, most viewers will not notice those differences on screen or on medium sized prints.
Thank you for this. Always worth a reminder…
Yeah, DPreview really missed the point of this lens and owe it a proper review. Fujifilm makes plenty of $4k--$99k cinema lenses and other $500-$2000 XF XC zooms that'll all beat the XF 18-120 in some area or another, but I can't think of any that'll deliver as much across the full spectrum of general travel zoom and videography scenarios as this lens can.