Fuji XF16-55mm Mk II - Update of a Classic

This is the new Fujifilm 16-55mm f2.8 lens. It's the updated version of the lens. It's a red badge lens which was generally regarded as one of the best zooms in the X system. Now I never owned that lens although I did use it quite a few times and I reviewed it which you can see up here and it was an excellent lens so there is a very high bar for this new version. So what you've got here is a standard or a mid-range zoom with a very similar focal range to the 16-50mm kit lens which is a lens that I'm really fond of but here you're getting a constant f2.8 aperture and what should be better optical performance across the whole of the image. Now if you've seen any of my reviews before you'll know that I'm not really interested in sharpness charts or things like that. I care about how this lens performs in actual use and as a landscape photographer I'm interested in how this lens will actually perform for my landscapes. However I'm spending some time at home in Lisbon right now so over the last week I've taken this lens out to shoot urban landscapes and street photography around the city to see what it's like. Now build quality matters to me. My lenses travel a lot and get used in some really nasty conditions from deserts to blizzards and mountains and the first iteration of this was built incredibly well. However it was also a really big really heavy lens and on the smaller bodies something like the X-T30 it didn't really feel as though it balanced particularly well. Now the current trend in Fuji's newer lenses seems to be that they are considerably smaller and lighter and this is no different. It weighs in at around 410 grams which is around the third lighter than the previous version and it's also lighter than the 16 to 80 lens and while it doesn't have the same focal length it does have a constant f 2.8 aperture and it feels like there is more metal in the construction. It's also smaller. The filter diameter is 72 millimeter as opposed to 77 millimeter on the older version and it just feels slimmer and better balanced on the smaller camera bodies. It isn't as small or as light as the new 16 to 50 which is a tiny lens but this is a more premium lens and again is f 2.8 through the whole zoom range. The rings all feel really nice. They have a good level of resistance and the aperture ring has a satisfying click as well as having the aperture markings on the ring which is something you don't get on the 16 to 50. One thing that it lacks however is the 16 to 50 has an all internal zoom which is something that I really like about that lens. However the old version of this did have an extending zoom as well and I guess it's just necessary to maintain the aperture across the focal length but overall the build is really nice. It feels really solid and the lighter weight makes it much more pleasant to use and carry around. Now while we're talking about lenses and photography gear I just want to take a moment to talk about what I do with my old gear when I upgrade. If you've seen my videos before you'll know that I don't do sponsorships on the channel but for this video I've made an exception because it's something that I use a lot myself. MPB are a fantastic site for buying, selling and trading in used photography gear and they're sponsoring today's video. So during my time doing photography I've upgraded camera bodies and lenses but selling my old gear has always been a major hassle. Negotiating the price and then organizing all of the shipping and dealing with the customer takes a lot of time but MPB remove all of the hassle. I send them a list of the equipment I want to sell letting them know what condition it's in and they send me a quote. Now if I'm happy with a quote all I need to do is box the gear and they come and collect it from my door. Super easy, no hassle. Then once they receive the gear they check the condition and in the past they've always actually increased the quote and if I agree then the money just goes into my bank account. But that's just the selling side they have a huge amount of camera lenses and bodies in excellent condition which has been checked by their experts. I got an amazing GFX 50R from them and it feels like a new camera. It really is a fantastic service for buying and selling camera gear which really takes all of the stress and all of the risk out of the equation. So check out MPB and thanks again for sponsoring this video. Now back to the review. So the standard or mid-range zoom is often classed as a do-it-all lens. The one zoom that you need to carry with you and it does everything and I can understand that. 60mm at the wide end is pretty wide and 55mm at the long end is into the short telephoto range. Now for what I've been doing this last week around Lisbon it's been great and it really does give you a huge amount of flexibility but putting my landscape hat on then I feel a little differently. Typically for landscapes my most common focal range is around 55 to 150mm and this feels a little short for punching into distant landscape scenes. In that respect the 16 to 80mm is a little more useful and likewise at the wide end I do do a lot of shooting around the 10 to 12mm range where I can get really close to foreground elements and still get plenty of sky in the frame. However that's my specific use case for landscapes and I think for most aspects of photography from portraiture to street this is a really useful focal range and a lens that you will use a lot. One of the complaints about the previous version of this lens was that it didn't have optical image stabilisation when quite a few of Fuji's less high-end lenses like the 16 to 80mm did. Now this new version also lacks optical image stabilisation which isn't really surprising as most of Fuji's lenses haven't had it and with most of their new cameras having stabilisation in body then it's less of a deal-breaker than it used to be. However not all of Fuji's new cameras have in-body stabilisation, the X-T30 Mark III and of course a lot of people are still using Fuji's older bodies like the X-T3 for example. So if image stabilisation is important to you then that might be worth bearing in mind. So this being a red badge lens its pricing is more premium than the 16 to 50mm and the 16 to 80mm. Now the new 16 to 50 is a more expensive lens than its predecessor and I don't think you can really call that a kit lens anymore so the price difference isn't as big as it was with previous generations of both of these lenses but the 16 to 50 is a really really good lens and one I've been really happy with and you're still paying over 500 dollars or euros more for this so it's a big investment. For sure you've got the constant aperture of f2.8 but what difference do you get with image quality? Now when it comes to image quality what I really care about is how the lens performs in the field at the kind of apertures that I usually use it for for landscapes which is closed down a little to where the lens performs best and gives me the maximum depth of field. Now I don't have the previous version of this lens to compare it to but I do have the 16 to 50 and the 16 to 80 so let's have a look at how it performs compared with those. Now I want to have a look at the sharpness at the kind of quality that you'll get from this lens right out of the camera on a raw file where it's not been sharpened or had anything done with it and to do this I've shot at f7.1 that's stopped down a little bit into the lens which is where the lens will tend to perform a little bit better and also where you should get quite a lot of depth of field but I also want to compare it to the other lenses that I've got in this category so I've got the 16 to 50 so let's have a look at these two lenses side by side. So on the left here you've got the 16 to 55 on the right here you've got the 16 to 50 they're both shot this is at the widest focal length at 16 millimeters using the exact same exposure settings. Now I noticed earlier when I zoomed into 100 you couldn't really see that much difference between the two lenses it only really becomes apparent when you zoom a little bit further to 200 so if we find this area of high detail down here now there's not a huge amount of difference I think like the number 25 is probably slightly more resolved on the 16 to 50 the text here on this fuse box some of these fuses some of these cables a little bit more detail but we really have to zoom in a lot to see that let's have a look over here where there's another lot of detail again not a huge amount of difference I think at a push I could say that um this is slightly sharper the 16 to 55 is slightly sharper but there's really not a huge amount of difference there. Now I also want to compare it to the 16 to 80 which is another lens that I use again this is at 16 millimeters slightly different exposure here because the light had dropped a little bit but I wanted to keep a similar level of brightness so I've just changed the shutter speed by a stop but there really shouldn't be much noticeable difference in the actual exposure let's go down here to this area of detail again now the difference is quite a bit bigger you start to see the softness in the 16 to 80 around these letters on the fuse box this the letters here on this yellow are not as clearly defined as you can see over here the detail in these tiles if we go over let's have a look at this part of it here into the corner again we're quite into the top right corner here there's a lot more detail on this railing and in the wall here this just looks a little bit softer in the corners now I want to have a look at the middle of the focal range around 35 millimeters again we've got the 16 to 55 on the left 16 to 50 on the right same exposure settings so let's just zoom in again now here I felt that difference was more apparent than it was at 16 millimeter the 16 to 55 just feels like it's resolving more detail here let's go down into the bottom corner to this fuse box and I think the difference is is quite a bit stronger here 35 millimeters particularly when we look in the corner this uh this text is sharper the detail around here is sharper we can only see the the top of that letter there but I think it's just resolving a little bit more detail it's not a super high detail uh area here let's just go in and look here not a not a lot of difference but again I would say the 16 to 55 here the difference is a little bit more apparent than it was at 16 millimeters and this is the 16 to 80 on the right now so I think the 16 to 80 it does perform better at 35 millimeter than it did at 16 millimeter let's just have a look at some of this detail here so we can see the fuse box and then over here I think yeah you can see the difference there between the 16 to 55 is resolving quite a little bit more detail and then right at the end of the focal range so we've got the 16 to 55 at 55 millimeter the 16 to 50 at 50 millimeter so both of the lenses are right at the end of their focal range and again using the same exposure settings so when we zoom in here you can see just looking through the window this text is a little bit clearer here we can see a little bit more detail again the the 16 to 50 it does perform well but I think that the 16 to 55 shows a little bit more detail here let's look at some of the detail on the actual on the tiles not a huge amount of difference um the 16 to 50 does seem a little bit brighter there's not really many clouds in the sky today so I'm not really sure what that's about um but I think let's have a look at this kind of chipping paint chip on the end of the railing they're not really a huge amount of difference I have to say and now on the right we've got the 16 to 80 now this is kind of in the middle of the focal range of the 16 to 80 so it should actually have a bit of an advantage here but let's just zoom in and see if we can see much difference and immediately just when I look at the tiles I can see that the 1655 is sharper when we look at the text on the paper again it's resolving more detail here more detail in the railing so yep I think the difference is a little bit more significant with the 16 to 80 than it is with the 16 to 50 now one last comparison I want to make is to look at the lens wide open at f 2.8 so here again on the left 16 to 55 on the right the 16 to 50 both wide open at f 2.8 and with the same exposure settings now let's zoom in to have a look at the difference and look at this area here of high detail now I think now wide open we start to see the difference gets a little bit bigger you can see more detail in the text here you can see a little bit more detail in the cabling and I think that's probably where the difference starts to come out with the 16 to 50 you have to stop it down to really get the maximum performance to get the best out of the lens as whereas with the 16 to 55 it's just sharp all the way through the aperture range let's have a look over here again you can see there's quite a bit more it's resolving quite a bit more detail here again it's not a massive difference I am zoomed in at 200 but the difference is certainly more noticeable here than it was at f 7.1 now let's have a look at the 16 to 80 now the 16 to 80 has a constant aperture of f4 not f 2.8 so I've had to adjust the shutter speed to compensate for that but let's just zoom in and have a look because this is both lenses wide open and I think here again you start to see the difference a little bit more profoundly let's go over here and again there's quite a bit of difference here this is quite soft here as we get into the corners let's go further into the corner over here into this railing and you see here yes this is quite soft this is actually really quite producing a lot of detail even wide open in the corners at f 2.8 let's have a look down here in this bottom corner it is softening a little bit in this bottom left corner it's not as sharp it was in the other corner or in the center or indeed is it 7.1 but it's still considerably sharper here than the 16 to 80 this looks quite mushy here this grass coming through the pavement there's no doubt this is a really excellent lens that performs well through all of its focal range and is sharp corner to corner even wide open it's also a very useful focal range for a lot of different kinds of photography and for a lot of people who don't need ultra wide or long telephoto lenses this will serve them well as a lens that you rarely have to take off your camera it's also a lot smaller and lighter than its predecessor and so i find it just balances better on the camera and not feeling so front heavy which is something that you notice particularly on the smaller camera bodies and if you're hanging around this for your neck for a day of street photography then you'll really appreciate that reduction in weight however fuji do have other options in the area and while it's not as versatile as a 16 to 80 in its focal range it's certainly a sharper lens however whether you choose this over the 16 to 50 i think is going to be a harder choice it is sharper yes and it does have the constant aperture but it's more expensive quite a bit heavier and bigger i suspect people will go different ways when they make that decision but it is a nice problem to have because they are both really great lenses and that's it for this video i hope it's been useful and i hope it's been interesting if it has please don't forget to like and subscribe i have a lot of fuji related content on this channel as well as videos about landscape photography and traveling and speaking of traveling if you enjoy my photography and would like to join me on one of my trips we run workshops to some amazing places and would love to have you along we've got tours coming up in nepal namibia utah madeira the galapagos and the drakensberg you can find full information on all those trips on my website so check that out and let me know if you have any questions and as ever good luck with all your photography and i'll see you next time take care