GF 80mm f/1.7
I went to walk around and take pictures with the gfx100s and gf80mm 1.7, to see how it handles, how focuses, the IQ, speed of the lens, etc. I’m not going to talk about optical formula, charts, or similar here. I want to see how the lens feels during the shoot and during postprocess.
My initial impressions of the lens are a bit bittersweet. I’ve gotten used to exceptional lenses with the GF system, and having a lens that has this amount of flaws, really makes me think about Fujifilm design decisions on a medium format system. I’ll keep updating this entry with more information and pictures.
On a side note I’ve used/own the canon RF 50mm 1.2 and 85 1.2, those lenses are heavier, have more glass than the 80mm 1.7 and have 0 CAs. Fuji excused themselves saying that it has a lot of glass or the lens would be heavy or that they can’t use the same focusing motor as the 110 f2. I honestly don’t buy it, the 110 f2 is heavier, is quieter and optically flawless (or close to). The canon options (that are more or equally priced) have better optical performance. I wouldn’t mind a lens 0.5kg+ heavier at the cost of optical perfection and probably an extra $1k.
Let’s start with the good
Colour rendition of the lens is great, no false colours or weird casting.
Sharpness.
Pleasant out of focus areas and transition. This is personal tho.
Fast focusing lens. At least with the 100s is really fast, I may test with the 100.
1.7
Little vignetting wide open, under normal light is not distracting.
The bad
A bit loud, not a huge problem for me can be distracting in studio and I can see a problem on weddings.
Chromatic aberrations. I haven’t seen a lens on this price range, performing this bad in a long time. It is bad, I don’t buy the “it doesn’t have CAs”. It has, it needs a lot of postporcessing if there are lights and high contrast areas.
The autofocus may hunt a bit. Even if it is fast, if it doesn’t achieve focus on the first second, it hunts. This may be related to the conditions.
Who is this lens for:
Photographers that need the 80mm FoV.
People that shoot at f4+ (Still don’t know why would you pick this lens over the 45-100 to shoot at those apertures).
People that like out of focus in their pictures, this lens doesn’t compress that much the environment, so it is a good option for full environmental body portraits.
Night time photography.
Natural light photography.
People who don’t mind CAs or postprocessing.
Who is not this lens for:
People that need to work on quite places. If you need to look like an absent presence, this is not your lens. It is not as bad as 63mm tho.
People that need extreme optical performance. It resolves the sensor but is not as contrasty as other GF optics and the CAs are really bad. (I suspected those results after my first shoot with the lens).
Videographers, this is loud, even with an external mic you may get a surprise.
Overall: 5.5/10 for a GF lens, I personally do not recommend it unless you need it. It doesn’t matter the situation, the lens has CAs at 1.7, on low contrast situations at 2.8 is solved, in metal surfaces, lights, fine detail at backlight, you need to go above f4 to get rid of those. I can’t think of a situation where if I have to do a professional session and pick this lens over the 63/45/110. If the customer wants small prints, maybe, but I’m quite disappointed with this lens. If you own the lens and disagree with me, is fine to have your own opinion. I’m basing mine on a direct comparison with other GF lenses that I own and use. We don’t like to spend money on things that don’t turn up the way we expected, specially photographers, is like when you say “X camera sucks”, providing comparison with other cameras at equal price range, there is always photographers that disagree because, well, they own that camera.
Some Pictures with the 80mm
This puppy was waiting for its owner at the entry of a grocery store. The picture has little correction, I used some colour corrections to adapt to my style, but the focus was good. The CAs where a bit tricky to deal with as the purple ones tend to be easy to correct, but the green areas are bit harder, C1 for example doesn’t correct them.
I added the vignette on this one, the original picture has little to no vignetting. The focus point was on the guy in the middle and it doesn’t look quite sharp compared with the sea. CAs on the the original are bad that I simply don’t want to spend 20 minutes in photoshop fine tuning the borders/masks to just correct the right amount and area
Picture of some flowers, as this is not a backlight or metal surfaces, there is no CAs and the image turned out pleasant.
This is a crop of one image taking at 1.7. The CAs are just our of the charts.
Using the defringe tool helps a bit, the but quality was already lost.
The next one was taken at 1.7, there is visible green fringing, that is actually harder to correct, C1 doesn’t even offer that option.
Another set of flowers with some CAs, at normal size is impossible to see, at 100 is not distracting. Still, it would need some extra help from photoshop to correct the CAs.
The rope was a bit frustrating as even I have a corrected version, it was not easy and the quality (sharpness) was never recovered.
Some portraits. CAs corrected. To be fair, when you are working in a portrait, the time you spend on this is nothing compared with the rest, still, the image quality lost is present because of it. Don’t check the bokeh in the first image as it was heavily retouched and it doesn’t represent the quality of the lens bokeh.
