Viltrox AF 13 mm f/1.4 XF review - Autofocus and focus breathing

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Viltrox AF 13 mm f/1.4 XF

3 November 2023

Maciej Latałło

10. Autofocus and focus breathing

Autofokus

The autofocus of the tested lens joined with the Fujifilm X-T2 is silent and flash-quick. Running through the whole distance range and its confirming doesn't take more than 0.3 of a second, an excellent result.

More reservations we can have when it comes to the accuracy of the mechanism. Even in good lighting conditions the lens can get stuck and doesn't find the right position – the autofocus field in the camera viewfinder or display becomes red and a red exclamation mark appears nearby. You have to press the shutter again and only then the focus is set properly. The final number of misses, reaching about 5%, was also a tad too high for offered parameters.

Still we didn't have any problems with front or back focus tendencies. Even if we took photos from really close distances our aim was always right in the middle of the depth of field available.

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Fujifilm X-T2, f/1.4

Focus breathing

Focus breathing tests show refraiming images as you oversharp them. We conduct the test by passing manually from the minimum focusing distance to infinity with the aperture stopped down; then we check how the field of view of the lens changed as a result.

After conducting a number of tests now we think we are able to determine some reference points. A frame change ranging from 0 to 5% we consider to be low. Between 5 and 10% you can speak about medium levels. Usually such values constitute also the maximum efficiency level of any breathing compensation algorithms, present in some bodies. Between 10 and 15% focus breathing is high, above 15% its level can be called very high.

The test video of the Viltrox lens is presented below:

After comparing freeze-frames from this video we can estimate that focus breathing of the tested lens amounts to about 1% so is completely negligible. Of course, with such a wide field of view and significant focusing distance of the lens the bar wasn't raised especially high but still, it's always nice to know that the Viltrox constructors made an effort and corrected focus breathing to practically zero.