Fujifilm Fujinon GF30mm F5.6 T/S review

How does it perform?

Tilt/Shift lenses like this are a challenge for designers but it comes as little surprise to learn that the new Fujinon GF30mm F5.6 T/S is a very high performer optically, especially when considering it is sitting in front of a 100MP sensor. Admittedly, Fujifilm says the sensor is optimised for this lens, so the results might be a little different on other models, but the performance is outstanding by all accounts.

Three-shot pano on maximum shift (±15mm), vignetting cleaned up in Capture One Pro (24). 1/250 sec, F8 at ISO80. If we’re being super-picky the extreme borders show a little loss of sharpness compared to the centre and mid-field but it’s still acceptable for a lot of use cases. The crop (at 100% actual pixels) from the original (15mm, max) shifted image on the extreme right-hand side from the completed pano. That’s impressive. Vignetting was removed in Capture One using the Light Falloff tool. No further adjustments were made. Resized to 1200px for site handling.

More importantly, it remains outstanding when shifted. There’s a reason why Fujifilm doesn’t indicate on the Shift or Tilt scales when the performance might begin to fall off because it’s excellent even at maximum shift. Admittedly there’s quite a lot of vignetting at that point, and it’s not as quite as easy or as quick to remove in Lightroom as Capture One but it’s entirely usable at F8-F11, if need be. At smaller F numbers diffraction might be an issue, certainly F22-32, but often mitigating the effect (loss of sharpness ) at F16-F22 is possible.

Tilting and shifting adds more vignetting as you can imagine but tilt on a wide-angle lens like this is less of an important feature for the intended market and therefore less of an issue overall. That being said tilting in the same direction up to 4 degrees had no real meaningful effect on vignetting (light fall off) over the optimal aperture range F8-11, anyway.

While it makes sense to include profile correction for lateral chromatic aberration, it is very low, and only the slightest fringing (longitudinal CA) is visible when looking at high-contrast edges outside, more often behind, the plane of focus.

A little barrel distortion is also evident, even with the profile applied which is somewhat irksome at times but no big deal in real terms. It’s a shame the profile correction wasn’t able to correct this fully automatically but profiling is somewhat sample-dependent anyway. Again parametrics like Capture One and Lightroom can be adopted to control and correct this easily and automatically, before handing it off to Photoshop.

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