Quirky but rewarding lens

I'll start by listing the issues with this lens:

• The AF speed isn't worth writing home about. In good light it's decent enough, sometimes it will lock focus straight away. In low light and macro mode it will hunt like crazy. This isn't so much a fault as a constraint of design though: if you understand how contrast detection works you can learn to aim at areas with obvious contrast so the lens doesn't try and rack through the whole focal range. If you're using it to capture something fast-moving like animals, I've found that maybe only 1/5 are keepers.
• There's a strange issue where switching from AF-C to AF-S makes the camera (on X-E1 at least) go nuts and demand to be turned on and off again.
• Pointed at a bright light source it can sometimes show internal reflections. This hasn't been a consistent problem for me though.
• Originally I had a problem where the aperture ring would behave as if set to A mode when set to a particular aperture. Fuji repaired the contacts on the lens and the issue has been resolved.
• 39mm filter thread is very hard to shop for.

Now with all that acknowledged, this lens is growing on me extremely fast. I recently went on a trip to Sydney and it stayed on my camera most of the time. Reasons being:

• It's extremely sharp. Not much more you can say here.
• The bokeh is very pleasant. The 9 bladed aperture ring delivers some very clean circles and you get smooth colours blending together at wider f stops. The out of focus transition is silky smooth even when you stop down, allowing you to get excellent background isolation.
• The 'half macro' is more than good enough for close ups of food, small objects, flowers etc.
• For a moderate telephoto, the lens is very modest in size. This not only makes it a cinch to carry around all day, it doesn't grab anyone's attention when you're going in for candid shots.
• Surprisingly good at portraits if the light is decent.

The 90mm equivalent view is something that initially will take a lot of getting used to if you are going to use it as a walk-around, but once you do it becomes easy to appreciate the effect of some moderate compression between background and foreground. This lens is fantastic at isolating interesting elements of the world around you. I'd say it's my favourite of all the Fuji lenses I own, and in the end the image quality completely outweighs the quirks of use.

I'm fond of the 60mm too and I like the fact that without it's ridiculously hood it is compact. Having a fairly deepset front element (when not in macro) I'm sure it doesn't need a hood in most cases but what I've done is fit cheap circular metal hoods to my 35mm lens (same as 18mm hood) and to my 14mm lens (same as 18-55mm hood) and fit the rectangular hood from my 35mm to my 60mm. This keeps everything compact whilst protecting the front element from flare and physical damage (non protective filter user).