01-22-2015, 08:15 AM
Quote:It certainly performs well but is one of the strangest sets of design criteria I've ever seen. I mean, the edges receive less than 50% as much light as the center at f/11 - perhaps they should have gone back to square one at some stage of the design and redesigned the front of the lens to not place the chief ray at such an extreme location and then cut it off by reducing element diameters for mechanical design. I wonder how the lens would perform if the vignetting were removed. Judging by the geometry that must be happening, quite poorly
The distortion is also highly disappointing. Certainly by leaving barrel distortion you "counteract" some of the so-called rectilinear distortion and hide its effects, but nearly 5% is monstrous, nearly as monstrous as Olympus' distortion
Correcting it would require a complete redesign of the lens though, perhaps fuji should have started at first order and focused on correcting the individual zoom groups instead of using them to balance each other.
I am wondering why the mirrorless lenses are generally less "harmonic" than the DSLR designs.