opinions on the 18-120?

XF 18-120/4 PZ vs Coca-Cola: Roughly a half inch taller and 100g heavier?

All-internal zoom, constant f4 aperture, seamless zooming from 28-360mm FF-equivalent zoom range (on an XTrans V HR camera with digital zoom enabled)! Whacky, and cool, and the surprises don't stop there! Thanks to its' "space age polymer body", it's shockingly light! Every inch of its' barrel is positively bristling with high quality feeling clicky buttons and smooth dials.

Unfortunately, that's where the problems start... It seems that the hardware guys did their job on this lens, but the firmware guys are still playing catch up! The nifty Z/F toggle feature only works if you have AF+MF enabled (which doesn't play nicely with my older MF clutch lenses). Twice in 10 minutes in a photography mode, my AF box got stuck and could not be moved with the focus-nipple until the camera was restarted.

My Sennheiser MKE-400 shotgun mic picks up zero AF noise from the LM motors, but the power-zoom is clearly but softly audible with or without my low-pass filter enabled. With a higher ambient noise level, I don't hear it when power-zooming in a slow "cinematic" speed, but it does sound like a faint "hearing test beep tone" at higher rates of zooming. I wonder if the PZ feature might be using a conventional DC motor instead of a piezo-electric?

Those X-Filmographers that shot their short movies for the product launch with beta versions of this lens and camera deserve a medal! I suspect Fuji's firmware devs are all hard at work fixing some of these issues (I am on the latest version of the firmware for both camera and lens - I checked!). I have faith in them to get it right soon, though.

So far it seems like a keeper to me, but I need to take it out and shoot some more with it to be sure.