While Fujifilm has had the 56mm f1.2 X lens available, they’ve lacked a longer and more flattering portrait lens. But earlier this year, the company announced their 90mm f2, which has a 135mm equivalent field of view. To date, it’s the company’s biggest prime lens and in some ways is almost as large as the DSLR equivalent that we’ve seen on the market. With a large focusing ring, it’s also quite nice to hold while remaining ergonomically balanced with many of the company’s higher end cameras.
The Fujifilm 90mm f2 R LM WR lens has a $949 price point and incorporates weather sealing, seven aperture blades, three extra low dispersion elements, Super EBC lens coatings, and 11 elements in 8 groups. Weighing 1.19lbs, it’s also fairly hefty for a lens designed for a mirrorless camera.
Tech Specs
Specs taken from the B&H Photo listing.
Features | |
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Autofocus | Yes |
Physical | |
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Filter Thread | Front:62 mm |
Dimensions (DxL) | Approx. 2.95 x 4.13″ (75 x 105 mm) |
Weight | 1.19 lb (540 g) |
Packaging Info | |
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Package Weight | 2.2 lb |
Box Dimensions (LxWxH) | 9.6 x 6.2 x 4.8″ |
Ergonomics
The Fujifilm 90mm f2 is a pretty beefy lens but more on the long side than anything. Considering the weather sealing and the fact that it’s a longer focal length, its size makes sense. We start our ergonomic tour with the front of the lens. With a 62mm front filter thread, you can attach a standard filter.
Move around to the top of the lens and you’ll find the focusing ring and the aperture ring. The body is made of metal all over–and it doesn’t skimp on overall quality.
Without the lens hood, it becomes much smaller. With the lens hood, the overall package is quite big. In shooting situations, you’ll want to keep it on to protect the lens.
Build Quality
The Fujifilm 90mm f2 is said to be weather sealed, but at the moment we haven’t taken it out in the sheets and sheets of rain that tend to hit NYC. The entire lens is made of metal and most of it is dominated by this massive focusing ring with groove that add extra grip for the user. On the X-Pro1 and the X-T1, it feels quite balanced, but on the X-T10, you immediately realize that this lens is a bit too heavy for the body upon attaching it.
Ease of Use
Being a telephoto lens offering from Fujifilm, we can’t expect either a depth of field scale or a distance scale. Instead, you’re best off using it in autofocus mode with the option of manually touching up the focusing by enabling it in the menu system. Users will most likely keep it in autofocus mode and if they’re shooting portraits they’ll want to set the camera to the smallest autofocus point. The lens and camera will work together to ensure that a small area is in focus.
Autofocus
The Fujifilm 90mm f2 isn’t one of the company’s fastest lenses to focus, but we wouldn’t actually say that it’s one of their slowest. Rather, it leans very far in both directions with no real middle ground.
With the camera set to the largest focusing point, the lens is very fast and almost comparable to results from a DSLR. When the focusing point is set to its smallest, it’s as slow as molasses.
We say that it’s slow, but overall it’s still not slow enough to make you lose a moment when doing a portrait session or to give you any major problems when shooting stagnant subjects. For what it’s worth though, that’s all that we’d shoot with this lens.
Image Quality
All of the images in this section were shot with the Fujifilm X-Pro1. We chose this camera to see if it can still hold its own and to overall see how the image quality is with this lens attached.
In our eyes, the old camera and the new lens deliver quite a great combination.
First Impressions
So far, we’re quite impressed with the image quality that Fuji’s 90mm f2 can deliver. While the focusing is slow, we can live with it considering that this is primarily a portrait lens. We don’t expect to shoot sports with it, and in general we wouldn’t use Fujifilm products to shoot sports at this point in their technological history. It would be a great lens for street portraits, but not street photography in its traditional candid sense.
Stay tuned for our full review of the Fujifilm 90mm f2 R LM WR.