Fujinon XF 80mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro
Fujifilm’s X-series has been missing a true 1:1 macro lens for quite some time. Michael Topham finds out if this is a close-up specialist’s dream lens
Michael topham finds out if this lens is a closeup specialist’s dream come true
Fujifilm has always been open about its plans to release new lenses. Every so often, we’re told that the firm’s roadmap has been updated, which usually offers a great clue as to what’s around the corner. One lens that has been on the cards for quite some time is the XF 80mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro. Unlike Fujifilm’s wider XF 60mm f/2.4 R Macro, it presents true 1:1 magnification and doesn’t require extension tubes such as the Fujifilm MCEX-11 or MCEX-16 to photograph the world in minute detail. It’s an optic that many keen close-up X-series photographers have been waiting for and fills a missing link in Fujifilm’s X-mount lens line-up.
Features
Although some lenses are labelled ‘macro’, not all are true macro lenses because they don’t reproduce an image of a subject at lifesize. One example is Fujifilm’s XF 60mm f/2.4 R Macro, which delivers a maximum magnification of half-lifesize (0.5x). The big attraction of this new lens is its minimum focus distance (25cm) and full-scale 1:1 reproduction ratio. With the 1.5x crop factor taken into consideration, the focal length is equivalent to 122mm in 35mm terms. This sees it nestle between the superb XF 56mm f/1.2 R and XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR lenses, which are equivalent to 84mm and 137mm respectively. At £1,249, the XF 80mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro is £450 more than the XF 56mm f/1.2 R and £400 more than the XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR at the time of writing. With a four-figure price tag, it’s a premium macro and is currently the most expensive fixed-focal-length X-series lens.
Optically, the lens’s construction is made up of 16 elements in 12 groups, including one aspherical lens, one Super extra-low dispersion (ED) lens and three additional ED lenses. The purpose of Fujifilm’s ED lenses is to reduce chromatic aberrations, while delivering clear colour reproduction, strong sharpness and high contrast. To make sure the lens renders circular bokeh at wide apertures,
‘ There are 11 seals against rain, dust and moisture’
Fujifilm has designed it with nine aperture blades and a rounded diaphragm. Not only is it the only Fujifilm X-mount prime currently to offer optical image stabilisation, allowing users to shoot handheld at five stops slower than would otherwise be possible, the lens also features a floating focus system with two focus groups. Plus, there’s the option to set the lens to 0.25m- 0.5m or 0.5m-infinity.
As a weather-resistant lens, there are 11 seals against rain, dust and moisture, and it has been designed to operate as low as -10°C.
There’s a 62mm filter thread, and the front element has a fluorine coating, making it less susceptible to smudges, water and dirt, and further improving its durability.
Autofocus
Focusing is of the fly-by-wire type and it was only when it was used in the studio, where you could hear a pin drop, that I became aware of a subtle, high-frequency whir when focusing across its full focus distance.
What’s more obvious is the hiss the lens makes when the OIS is set on or off. Hold the lens to your ear or use it where there’s barely any ambient sound and you’ll hear it. This doesn’t rule it out for video, but in extremely quiet surroundings a camera’s built-in microphone would pick it up. With such a large focus distance range to cover, it’s not the fastest focusing X-series prime. In use, I found that refining the size of the AF point and using the focus- distance switch helped to minimise extensive focus shifts and improved response.
Build and handling
The design of the lens isn’t too dissimilar to the XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR, albeit 25mm longer and 5mm larger in diameter. It has a fairly thin aperture ring set towards the rear and a large, finely grooved manual-focus ring located just in front. The rubberised focus ring operates smoothly and the aperture ring notches through its range in 1/3-stop increments. It has a firmer resistance than the focus ring and rotating it anti- clockwise beyond f/22 sets it to its automatic setting. Offset to the side of the barrel you’ll find the focus distance and OIS switches. As lens switches go, they’re fairly small and, like sections of the barrel, these are made from plastic as opposed to metal.
The overall standard of construction is high, but for a lens as expensive as this is, you would expect it to have an all-metal barrel. Handle it and compare it side by side with the XF 90mm f/2 R LM WR and you’ll notice the barrel of the latter feels more robust.
Practically, using plastic in the construction helps keep it lightweight (750g) for its size. The pronounced clunking the lens makes when it’s tilted might send alarm bells ringing as it’s taken out of the box. However, this is quite common with image-stabilised lenses.
When reversed, the lens hood hugs the barrel and provides good protection when it’s being transported. The weather seal around the metal mount also does a good job.
Image quality
Plenty of photographers will forgive the lens not having a metal barrel, as long as it makes up for it in image quality. The good news is that the lens does just that, producing a fine set of
lab results, which were backed up with good levels of sharpness in close- up images captured on the X-T2. Studying the graph from our Image Engineering tests clearly indicates that by closing the lens down from its maximum aperture towards f/4, there’s a notable improvement in centre sharpness, with corner sharpness figures peaking between f/5.6 and f/8. For optimum sharpness across the frame and in low-light situations where you’re not forced to shoot at f/2.8, users will benefit from stopping the lens down. Though the figures tell us corner sharpness is fractionally better at f/11 than at f/2.8, the introduction of diffraction does begin to soften fine detail – something that became obvious when studying shots taken at f/16 and f/22 under close scrutiny.
Fujifilm uses software correction to reduce shading in its cameras’ JPEG output, but even when looking at uncorrected raw files, it’s easy to see that shading from this lens is very low indeed. We measured just 0.5EV with the aperture wide open at f/2.8 and stopping down to f/5.6 eradicates any shading entirely. When it’s used as a portrait lens, some users may find themselves adding vignetting during postprocessing to encourage the viewer’s eye to the centre of the frame.
Medium-telephoto primes are known to perform well when it comes to distortion and the XF 80mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro is no different. Our tests reveal the smallest amount of pincushion distortion, even when studying raw files with all corrections turned off, but a figure of 0.1% really isn’t anything to worry about in real-world use. As reported in the past when we’ve tested other X-mount lenses, Fujifilm delivers correction for raw files via lens-specific metadata. This is automatically accessed by the raw converter you use to correct or mitigate common optical phenomena and is the reason Fujifilm lenses aren’t listed under lens profiles in Camera Raw or Lightroom.