Fujinon XF 18-55mm F2.8-4 R LM OIS Review

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The kit lens that doesn’t know it’s a kit lens. The Fujinon XF 18-55mm F2.8-4 R LM OIS Zoom Lens delivers sharp handheld image, ease, and versatility at $699

Fujinon XF 18-55mm F2.8-4 R LM OIS Features

There are significant reasons why this versatile multi-focal lens is the top choice of pros and amateurs wanting professional quality. The lightweight metal body has a great feel in your hand, and when used on Fuji’s cameras it delivers super sharp images without distortion and light falloff.

Build

This XF 18-55mm F2.8-4 R LM OIS zoom has a range of 27mm wide-angle to 84mm telephoto, quickly providing you the range you need. The lens is made up of 14 Elements in 10 groups, which includes 3 aspherical & 1 extra-low dispersion systems. The angle of view runs from 79.1° – 28.4° degrees.

The inner barrel is plastic. There are three knurled metal control ring. The manual focus ring is narrow. Next is the much larger zoom ring. Finally, there’s the aperture control ring. It’s closer to the base of the lens and is about the same size as the manual focus ring. The ridges are easily distinguished from the well-damped zoom or focus ring, making them easy to identify them by touch.

The barrel has switches for aperture and one for turning on/off the OIS.

Thanks to the quality optical image stabilization, handheld images are possible at shutter speeds up to four stops slower than other lenses without it. It matches up for use with polarizing and graduated filters because of its’ internal focusing and non-rotating 58mm filter thread. The plastic petal-shaped hood fits the front of the lens via a bayonet fitting.

Focus

The Fujinon 18-55mm uses an electronic autofocus system, which is very fast. The design is fly-by-wire, so there is no direct connection between the focusing ring and the autofocus system: autofocus results are very quick and near-silent. Attached 58mm filters will not rotate.

Image Quality

The lenses are optimized for sharpness in the center, with softer corners and edges at wide apertures. But there really is no doubt this lens will deliver super-sharp edge-to-edge images at all settings because its’ in-camera correction is incredible.

Distortion is completely invisible, except for moderate to minor pincushion distortion at 23mm, no lateral color fringes or Light falloff which is probably fixed with software in the camera, and ghosting can be controlled with the hood.

Bokeh is great for a kit lens, though you may encounter some rings in your bokeh balls.

Vignetting is pretty significant when wide open and even closed down one stop, and aberrations exist but are controlled quite well.

Capable of producing decent sunstars (14-pointed) thanks to the rounded 7-blade diaphragm.

Pros

Fast and quiet autofocusing and zooming
Very crisp optics
Bright aperture
Solidly built
Effective Optical Stabilizer
Lightweight

Cons

Omits some wide-angle coverage
Not great for macro
No numbers on Aperture ring
Not weather-sealed
Plastic hood