The Fujifilm 23 - the 2.0 or the 1.4?

gdanmitchell wrote:

GMacF wrote:

gdanmitchell wrote:

I'm going to comment on two aspects of your post below.

Ozmoose wrote:

Admittedly, it's (the 23mm f/1.4) one of the older lenses. I've read all about the various problems with this lens, the softness in the corners, color shifts, wobblies et al. None of these apply to my baby - it works well, I've put it thru its paces at my usual f/5.6-f/8 settings, and all's good. Excellent results. Other than the extra weight, I'm happy with it.

Two points about this.

First, my assessment of this lens matches yours. I've been using it since about the time it was released, and it has been a consistently excellent performer. I'm confused and mystified by the bad mouthing it gets from some.

Actually, I'm not as mystified as I used to be. Some of that kind of stuff is hyperbole and posturing, and some of it is cover for believing that every new thing is miles ahead of every old thing and must therefore replace the old thing.

From my experience I found the old 23mm f1.4 to produce the best results out of all the 23mm lenses I’ve owned. I thought the rendering and contrast were just superb. My issue was getting those results time in time out. My copy had the back focussing issue which I was happy to put up with in the early stages but I grew tired of always having to second guess where focus would land.
Of course I appreciate that not every copy of the lens had this issue but it’s been reported widely enough that I couldn’t be bothered trying multiple copies just to get a good one.

Given the way the mirrorless systems' AF works, I doubt that the issue was actual "back-focusing" with this or any other Fujifilm camera/lens. Back-focus happens on DSLR systems largely because of how SLR systems AF. On mirrorless systems the actual image on the sensor is the source of the AF, precluding this particular kind of issue that occurs on SLR systems. (It is one of the reasons that we don't have to micro-adjust AF on mirrorless cameras.)

I can think of a range of other possible causes: perhaps the lens' focus distance changes as aperture changes (though I've never seen evidence of this on this lens), perhaps you were using a large aperture and a "focus and recompose" approach, perhaps you were not precisely on the primary focus target, perhaps there is some kind of field curvature issue that caught you, etc.

Dan

Whatever it was it wasn’t an isolated issue, I had similar AF unreliability with this lens on various occasions also, particularly on my X-Pro3 (as opposed to earlier bodies), and I’ve seen it mentioned by others too.

I’ve used plenty of Fuji lenses (including the 35 f1.4 and the 23 f2) and this was the only one I saw repeatedly “focus” with a green box in the viewfinder, on a stationary object, but then turn out to be slightly out in the final image.  Most odd but definitely a bug somewhere.