Many, many year ago I bought the Canon 85mm 1.2 to shoot indoor volleyball. It was a very large lens. Large and heavy. It gave me much light through the viewfinder, but I could not use that largest opening, because it gave sharpness only in a very small area.
Hi Raymond, A Fujinon APS (prime) lenses wouldn't be that fast immediately when we properly compare them to their full-frame equivalents. The Fujinon 56mm/f1.2, for example, is equivalent to a 85mm/f1.8 in terms of FoV, DoF and collecting total amount of light for a photo, as excellently explained by Tony Northrup:
I think 99% of the buyers fail to convert the F numbers when comparing APS vs FF lenses; even this reviewer here
nicely forgets about the F-number conversion. If Fujifilm wanted to make a similar lens as the Canon 85mm/f1.2, then it should be an F0.8 lens. I was not aware of these things either until recently when our own Joe Camosy (Redlion) on this forum explained why he uses a (focal-reducer) Speed Booster
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/53846077
When you compare the sizes and weights of
Fujinon prime lenses they
are not smaller than their corresponding FF lenses as shown here
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/54109810
These days, with the X-series Fuji cameras you get acceptable images with ISO 3200. That means you are able to get images even in not-to-good lighting.
ISO is another Fuji trick/cheat;
Fuji ISO 3200 is equivalent to Canon/Nikon/Sony ISO1600. I was not aware of this until recently someone pointed out this phenomenon and Tony Northrup mentions that, too.
If you put the Fujinon prime lens collection into this full-frame perspective, they are not that fast immediately. Where they are great is that
they all have aspheric(al) element(s) and the
quality of the image that they deliver is state-of the art. In terms of shallow DoF and total amount of light per photo, no APS camera can compete against a full-frame camera. I think all the APS vs FF comparisons/reviews simply ignore the facts of physics.
I love my X-A1, and this was the reason I bought a Speed Booster following Redlion's hints. Yesterday I bought
my first aspherical lens, a Voigtlander 20mm/f3.5 (sic!). f3.5 is (terribly) slow on an APS camera, but with the Speed Booster it would correspond to a 13.3mm/f2.3 Fujinon lens, which is roughly the same (with the Speed Booster, of course) as the Fujinon 14mm/f2.8.
Aspherical Voiglander 20mm (Nikon mount) on Speed Booster on a Fujifilm camera: a perfect match delivering near full-frame FoV and DoF handling.
Take care and have fun, Miki
