Yay Me! Based on a professional recommendation to run out and purchase either a Reikonon, or a Pentagon FF lens from a working pro, I found this lens, a 50mm 1.8 on eBay. It shipped from Stuttgart Germany and it must have been sent on a scenic tour of the world as it took weeks to arrive on the East Coast. However, for $69.00 bucks, and the quality images both in sharpness, contrast, and MICRO contrast I would have waited longer! WOW. It’s manual focus only, and I also had to purchase a M42 screw-mount adapter to Fuji for $4.99 for it but it was well worth the price. For a grand total of less than $80.00 shipped I got one heck of a lens~ If you can find one, get one! or two.
One thing I have noticed with the “fly-by-wire” or electronic Fuji (as well as others such as Nikon, Canon etc) is that an auto-focus lens, when you attempt to manually focus, just doesn’t work as well as most people say. There is too much turning of the focusing ring back and forth, and I have never been happy with the results; besides, it’s auto focus – so why would I even want to manually attempt focus? Honestly. However, this lens is a fully manual lens, using the focus peaking on the X-T2 is just amazingly easy! I can’t get over how simple, fast, and easy it is to focus. This lens is all metal and has a beautiful rubberized ring and I have to say it’s as smooth as silk.
Here are some images I took the other day while playing around with it:
I’m amazed at the clarity of the images. These are taken in Acros, Jpeg. The bokeh it produces is circular, and oh so creamy. You can’t tell the there as I had it stopped to maybe 5.6 but it’s just so darn cool!
The rendering of the background trees is Just Beautiful! The crispness and clarity of what’s actually in focus is unreal. I can’t get over not only the image quality, but how easy and how much fun it is to use. When I first purchased the Fuji X-E1 in February 2013 I mounted my old, well used Minolta 58 1.4 to use it. This was a fully manual lens and was so simple to focus and use. Today’s Fuji’s coupled with the tremendous improvements in focusing and speed via perpetual (it seems) firmware updates – especially in focus peaking, makes using TRUE manual focus lenses such a joy again!
Here are a couple of other images, photographed Indoors, Jpeg mode, just testing not only the lens, but my manual focusing capabilities:
Adventures with the Fuji X System 