Fujifilm Fujinon XF 23 mm f/1.4 R review - Introduction

Have you rated your lenses yet?

Fujifilm Fujinon XF 23 mm f/1.4 R

19 March 2014

Arkadiusz Olech

1. Introduction

Those companies who’ve been developing their own mirrorless systems are rather skimpy with truly aperture-fast lenses – f/1.4 or better. For example neither Canon nor Olympus nor Sony feature such a bright device in their line-ups; Samsung has just one and Panasonic- two. Even Nikon, with a system featuring the smaller sensor so theoretically the easiest for a construction of fast lenses, has just one of them.

There are two praiseworthy exceptions, though. The first – independent optics manufacturers. For example Voigtlander boasts as many as three f/0.95 fast lenses designed for cameras with Micro Four-Thirds sensors. The Fujifilm company is another exception as it has already three f/1.2-1.4 lenses for their X system. The Fujinon XF 35 mm f/1.4 R, launched at the very beginning, with the first camera of that system, the Fujifilm X-Pro1, has been tested by us long time ago. The Fujinon XF 23 mm f/1.4 R is the second fast lens and the Fujinon XF 56 mm f/1.2 R is the third, presented not so long ago.

All of these are interesting but the Fujinon XF 23 mm f/1.4 R seems to have the biggest chances to be really popular because of its universal focal length and journalistic parameters. Joined with X-E1/X-E2 type of bodies it can be a great tool for street or journalistic photography – small wonder it landed close to the top of our list of testing priorities. Courtesy of the Fotozakupy.pl shop we managed to borrow it and test in our office.

Please Support Us

If you enjoy our reviews and articles, and you want us to continue our work please, support our website by donating through PayPal. The funds are going to be used for paying our editorial team, renting servers, and equipping our testing studio; only that way we will be able to continue providing you interesting content for free.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - advertisement - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

You are also invited to get acquainted with our test procedure, described in the article "How do we test lenses?" If you feel it’s still not enough, please go to our FAQ section where you can find some further explanation.