After a long wait — Fuji prioritized customers ordering the GFX 50S II kits — I’ve received a copy of the GF 35-70 zoom. The first thing I did was test it to make sure I have a good copy, and it did fine. You can see the results here.
I’ve been working on a full, quantitative evaluation of the lens, but that’s a lot of work and it’s taking a while. Today I’ll present a visual test using a low-contrast Siemens star target.
Test conditions:
- Target distance 20 meters
- ISO 100
- Manual exposure, varying the f-stops
- Arca Swiss CA on RRS legs
- 2-second self timer
- AF-S, best of 3 images at each sequence; this calibrates out focus curvature
- Developed in Lr 11.1 with default settings except for sharpening turned off and white balance.
- White balanced to the lower right gray background of the Imatest Siemens star
Usually, I use manual focusing for these tests, but I am sad to report that the response of the GFX 100S manual focus to twisting the focusing ring is so twitchy that manual focus in unreliable with this lens. I will see if I can fix that.
In the center at a bit over 200% magnification, at 35 mm focal length:
F/5.6 is the sharpest, but f/8 isn’t bad. F/11 is seriously diffracted.
At 45 mm focal length:
Best at f/5.6, but f/8 is just fine.
At 70 mm focal length:
f/5.6 an f/8 are good.
In all of these, the contrast is a bit lower than I’d like, but this is great performance for a kit lens.
Next up: the corner.
Leave a Reply