The New Zoom

I have a few zooms for my Canon DSLR. They were good, but when it comes to image quality, you just couldn't beat a prime. Another advantage of prime was the fact that you could get a fast wide aperture.

My favorite lens for the EOS 7D was the 50mm f1.4. But this being an APS-C camera, you would get an 80mm perspective with this lens. That's good if you plan to do portrait. But a pain to get architecture snaps. The 35mm f1.4 for Canon was just too expensive and heavy. But lately, Sigma and other third-party lens maker had come up with some gem of lenses.

But still, fast prime lens could still be bulky and limiting.

Then I discovered the X100. A small compact but with a 35mm f2.0 lens. I fell in love with Fuji ever since. I just love the palate of the jpg coming off the lens. After all, they had been the premier maker of film negatives before the digital age. They would know a thing or two about colour rendering I was sure.

Then the X-Pro 1 was released. Now I have also added on the X-T1. But the main attraction for me as far as the Fuji lineup was concerned was the selection of lens. More specifically the primes.

Despite their spec, they were highly portable. Now, I have 4 primes in the line-up. I have the 35mm f1.4 to start with - equivalent to 50mm in full frame term - then I added on the 18mm f2.0 which cover my favorite focal length, the magic 28mm. Shane Shame that the lens wasn't the sharpest.

Next came the much anticipated 23mm f1.4 - a 35mm equivalent.

Right around the release of this lens, I heard the announcement of more lenses on the pipeline. 4 lens caught my fancy. Fuji would be releasing a fast portrait lens, the 56mm f1.2, a wide angle zoom the 10-24mm f4 with OIS, the standard zoom 16-55mm f2.8 and the tele-zoom 50-140mm f2.8. The last two only coming out later this year or early 2015.

I bought the 56mm a couple of months ago and that was permanently attached to the X-T1 lately to compliment the GR which covered the 28mm perspective. The 56mm was very sharp even wide open at 1.2 at the risk of making the depth of field too narrow for comfort.

The recent walk in Pudu convinced me that I should explore the wide angle perspective even more. The idea of owning the 10-24mm zoom didn't seem too bad after all. A quick phone call to my usual dealer soon sorted that out. I picked up the lens last week.

I only managed a single outing with the zoom so far. It was at Pavilion in harsh early afternoon sunlight. And the contrast made me jump when in uploaded the snaps onto Aperture. I had to tone down the contrast, and despite being a zoom, the snaps were sharp wide open from edge to edge. The OIS helped with indoor snaps as the amount of light the lens had to gather at wide angle was enormous.

So, going out for photowalk may pose an issue from now on as I wasn't sure which lens to take with me ... It looked like it would be the 10-24 for the next few weeks though ...

More samples from this lens here and here.