Fujifilm 27mm f2.8 – Review & Sample Photos

The Fujinon 27mm f2.8 pancake lens is one of Fujifilm’s smallest and lightest lenses and is a perfect fit for the photographer looking for something compact and low profile for street shooting or travel.

The 27mm produces an field of view with the 35mm equivalent of 41mm. From overall image quality to the mechanical build, this lens is a very solid lens. Optically it can produce some amazing images while never holding you back with any major flaws.

Because of its small size and weight, it becomes one of those specialty lenses that every Fujifilm shooter should consider taking a second look at.

Fujifilm 27mm f2.8 Lens Review

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 200 – f2.8 – 1/1600

Fujinon 27mm f2.8 – First Impressions

This lens is fantastic for how small and light it is. It makes Fujifilm’s smaller cameras even more compact and really helps photographers looking for a low profile camera system.

On an APS-C body the 27mm performs like a 41mm (35mm equiv) lens and optically seems pretty sharp. I’m noticing it performs better close than it does at infinity focus, but this is partly due to exaggerations of camera shake on objects far away when shooting hand held and the lens does not give you a lot of support for steading these smaller cameras, especially when dealing with the resolving power of 24 megapixels with Fujifilm’s newer cameras.

One thing that also happened was when I first put this lens on my X-Pro 2 firmware v1.0, I was getting a ton of back focusing. It wasn’t missing, it was just always focusing on the background. After upgrading the firmware of the X-Pro 2 and the firmware of the lens, I no longer have focus problems.

Ultimately I’m very happy with this lens and it’s been my #1 travel lens despite having many other great lenses to choose from. I especially love it with my X-Pro 2 but it’s also a fun lens to use with the X-T2 as well. I’ll show some samples of what it looks like on those two cameras later.

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 1250 – f5.6 – 1/60

Shooting 41mm

It’s always hard deciding between shooting a proper 35mm and a 50mm. The Fujinon 27mm gives you a field of view of about 40mm. After using this lens a lot, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s now my favorite field of view to shoot with. 35mm is often too wide and you find yourself needing to get very close to the action. 50mm seems like it’s too telephoto sometimes and you find yourself having to move way back when trying to capture a large scene. 40mm for street photography just seems right, that of course, is my opinion.

The Slower Speed

At first I wasn’t too excited about a lens that only shoots f2.8, however, after using the 35mm f2 and the 23mm f1.7 extensively, I’ve come to realize that those lenses don’t really resolve good detail until about f2.8 anyway and I find myself almost never shooting much lower than f2.

The Catch?

It’s a great lens, it really is, it’s small light, and sharp, the only problem I have with it is the price. It’s a bit over priced. Canon offers their full frame pancake lenses with a similar field of view for around $200 bucks and it often goes on sale for $150.

The Fujinon 27mm f2.8 goes for $450 and goes on sale for $350.

I would like to see this lens for no more than $200 to $250 considering it’s an APS-C lens that’s not that fast or weather sealed.

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 400 – f2.8 – 1/1250

Overall Performance

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 400 – f5.6 – 1/75

Lens Design

The lens design is very simple. It has no aperture controls like most Fujinon lenses and there is no lens hood either. Because of this, using the lens takes a little getting use.

To adjust the aperture on the Fujinon 27mm f2.8 lens you have you use the finger dial (on the X-T2 / X-Pro 2). It’s a little tricky because sometimes the lens will be in Auto aperture mode and you’ll notice the aperture changing on its own after you’ve set it.

This really confused me for a few days and I could not figure out how to toggle between auto aperture and manual aperture and thought it was a bug. Turns out, all you have to do is turn the dial a few clicks past f16 and the aperture will click into auto aperture mode, turn the other way and it should switch back to full manual.

The 7 blade aperture combined with the 7 elements in 5 groups and the HT-EBC lens coating produces some nearly flawless images, with some descent bokeh, contrast and consistent sharpness.

While the lens doesn’t have any real major flaws, it doesn’t really have any unique characteristics either. There really isn’t much magic to this lens, I would call it an all around just average, but because it’s built so compact the lens becomes something that’s simple and fun lens to use.

Note that this lens does not have the newest microcomputers for the faster contrast AF. This means, although it’s phase detection autofocus is still very quick, it will perform a little slower in low light and high frequency settings when contrast AF is used.

Build Quality

The Fujinon 27mm f2.8 in terms of build quality has some nice quality. It’s small and light but still feels very solid because of it’s all metal construction.

I’ve never been a fan of many of the Fujinon lenses in terms of build quality, I love that they’re made of metal but the f-stop and focus rings never had enough resistance and they would always move unknowingly making the lens feel cheap.

Although this lens was released in 2013, it doesn’t exhibit the same cheap feeling as many of the other Fujinon lenses. It doesn’t have an aperture control ring and the focus ring feels comfortably firm.

One thing I do notice is the front element moves are you are focusing, which becomes more apparent when you have a UV filter attached.

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 400 – f5.6 – 1/420

Picture Quality

Considering how small and light this lens is, it still is able to put out some really nice image quality. It’s decently sharp, without much edge and corner softness, there isn’t a whole lot of distortion and vignetting isn’t much of a problem either.

The lens coatings keep the lens free from glare and ghosting making it nice for street and night shooters and bokeh is very smooth and uniform.

Sharpness Chart

In terms of corner to corner sharpness, the Fujinon 27mm f2.8 produces some very nice detail. Although it does lose some detail in the edges and corners, I was surprised how well it maintained this detail considering how simple the design is.

Fujifilm X-T2 – ISO 200 – f5.6 – 1/640

Diffraction

Since I didn’t have access to my chart, I shot diffraction tests using tree bark. This is a 100% crop of the center of the image at different f-stops. At f2.8 the camera still resolves some really sharp detail and it holds this up until about f8, f11 softens up and by f16 we’re hit pretty hard by diffraction.

The sweet spot is around f4 – f5.6. Even f2.8 is still pretty sharp.

Beauty

Even at f2.8 you can get some nice bokeh as long as your subject is close and keeping the aperture under f11 also helps keep the lens pretty glare free.

If you’re looking for great sun stars, this will not be the right lens for you but you can still produce some nice light effects when shooting at night.

Flaring Ghosting

You won’t really get any unique flaring or ghosting with this lens but that also means you can shoot straight into the sun without it drowning out your image with light or losing much contrast. Of course if you want crazy flaring, you could always throw on a cheap UV filter.

The Fujinon 27mm features the HT-EBC lens coating to minimize flaring.

What is the HT-EBC coating?

It means “High Transmittance Electron Beam Coating.” It’s basically Fujifilm’s newer high quality fancy 11-layer coating. Ultimately it should help produce more vivid colors, contrast and ghosting and flare reduction.

Rendering

Fujifilm X-T2 – ISO 200 – f2.8 – 1/250

Technical Characteristics

With a minimum focus range of 0.35m which is about 13 inches, the lens allows for your subject and camera to get close enough so as to not to cause any problems that interrupt your photography. Some of Fujifilm’s other lenses like the 56mm f1.2, always had issues with close focus and you always would find yourself in a situation where your too close for the lens to function.

I had to really go out of my way to find some chromatic aberrations and they are virtually don’t exist in most of my shots.

The Focus Breathing is definitely present but it’s not a huge problem. I would say it feels like you move out maybe 3mm from infinity focus to the minimum focus range.

Mechanical

Mechanically the Fujinon 27mm is very solid. No serious issues with focus shifts, or field curvature. The front element does telescope out when as you get closer to the minimum focus range, so the lens does get a few degrees tighter when focusing closer.

While 0.35m minimum focus range isn’t that great, it’s not terrible either and it rarely is an issue.

Aberrations

Because of the two ED elements, color fringing is very well controlled and Fujifilm has built in profiles that correct for much of this.

Refraction

Fujifilm cameras bake a lens profile into the RAWs and JPEGs that does a little correcting for things like distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberrations. But it is possible to turn this profile off with Iridient Developer.

I’ll show both situations, with it left turned on and with it turned of. Most people will never know what it looks like with the profile correction turned off and will think everything is performing fine. However, it’s still relevant to know the quality of the image the lens is actually producing. For example if the distortion is very bad, the image will be stretched and sometimes scaled to adjust for the distortion and pixels will be lost.

With Vignetting, if the edges are really bad then the profile correction will be apply an exposure lift to the edges that can cause less dynamic range and more grain along the edges and corners.

Size & Weight

The size and weight of this lens makes it a great partner to any of Fujifilm’s range finder cameras. It makes the X-Pro 2 much easier to handle and a lot more compact.

Fujinon 27mm f2.8 Lens Review – The Bottom Line

For photographers looking to keep a low profile for street photography or for casual shooting, this lens is a must have. I absolutely love it on my X-Pro 2, and while I have lenses that perform better, the size and weight of this lens makes it my go-to when traveling light.

While some lenses perform better than others and while this lens may not be everything we want in a lens, its size more than makes up for any of its flaws and it becomes a very fun and practical lens to use.

The image quality produced is also very acceptable. It’s pretty sharp in the center and produces only very little vignetting, distortion or chromatic aberrations. Contrast and color are also very crisp and vivid.

Not having an aperture control on the lens takes some time to get use to and I don’t love how the front element telescopes out when focusing close. However, those are forgivable features and would be even more forgivable if the lens was less expensive, which brings my to the only real problem I have with this lens – the price. It’s a little high for a pancake lens especially for on that’s not weather sealed, so you might want to wait for this one to go on sale.

Prices & Accessories

Fujinon 27mm f2.8 lens and camera firmware can be found here.

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Fujinon 27mm f2.8 – Sample Images

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 400 – f5.6 – 1/60

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 400 – f5.6 – 1/60

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 200 – f5.6 – 1/220

Fujifilm X-T2 – ISO 200 – f2.8 – 1/3000

Fujifilm X-T2 – ISO 200 – f5.6 – 1/1600

Fujifilm X-T2 – ISO 200 – f5.6 – 1/500

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 800 – f5.6 – 1/60

Fujifilm X-T2 – ISO 200 – f2.8 – 1/1100

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 400 – f5.6 – 1/480

Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – ISO 200 – f5.6 – 1/105