Fujifilm Fujinon XF 18-55 mm f/2.8-4 OIS review - Distortion

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Fujifilm Fujinon XF 18-55 mm f/2.8-4 OIS

6 September 2013

Arkadiusz Olech

6. Distortion

As long as you work with JPEG files the distortion isn’t an issue. At the shortest focal length you can observe slight barrel deformations which value we determined as -1.23% In the middle of the focal range that aberration decreases to -0.55% and by 55 mm it reaches just –0.09%.

Fujifilm, like the producers of other mirrorless systems, shifts the responsibility of correcting the distortion on the programmers and the Fujinon 18-55 mm proves that much. The optics, when left on its own, has a lot of problems with distortion correction – it can be noticed on RAW files, developed by an independent program, like dcraw.

In case of raw files at 18 mm focal length you must take into account a huge -5.27% “barrel”. What’s more, on the edge of the image you can perceive a trace of moustache distortion. In the middle of the focal range that aberration is already low, amounting to just 0.24%. It is interesting that in RAW files its level is lower than the level of distortion excessively corrected in the opposite direction which you can see in JPEG files. At the maximum focal length the problems reappear – there you deal with visible 2.59% “pincushion”.

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Still you have to admit that the Fujifilm company does a right thing to some degree: the angles of view, stated in specifications, correspond with JPEG files after distortion correction so the customers cannot complain they were misinformed. For example at 18 mm focal length the field of view measurement of an JPEG file is 76.54 degrees (with the error on the level of 0.05 of a degree). That result is in perfect accordance with the specifications. When you measure the field of view in RAW files you get 79.98 degrees so a value corresponding with the 17 mm focal length on an 1.5 x detector.