Quality of Fujinon XS8X4AS-XB8 ?

The folks at Fujinon just sent me the standard boilerplate "we're sorry you're not happy with your lens" e-mail and are asking for the loaner lens back now.

Now comes the process of trying to get this expensive lesson behind me and recover my purchase price. I've lost a lot of money just in shipping lenses back and forth overnight, so this turned out to be one costly rental, what it boils down to.

I still have to figure out how I'm going to do the limousine interior shoot next weekend. I'll need to find a decent wide attachment, or find a 4mm Nikon and rush order an Adaptimax. What a catastrophe! For the life of me, I can't figure how Fujinon could sell a lens like this with such a poor PQ as compared to the stock lens. Anyone who buys this is going to be deeply-disappointed, after using the stock lens. The extra wideness is lost to the fuzziness of the images and becomes "what's the point?".. I'd rather have crisp, sharp narrow images than fuzzed out blurry wide images.
 
This lens reminds me of the debacle I went through over the HVR-V1U and it's lousey audio. Of course this was easier to prove, since video folks are more picky about picture quality than sound.

I'm glad my 'guineapig-ness' was helpful to others in avoidance of this lens. Jeeze, what a dud lens..
 
In Canada there is a 30 day no question asked consumerlaw (BC anyway).
Credit cards have no problem handling situations like this.
 
Here in the US, credit card chargebacks are the last barrier of protection, so if negotiating a refund fails, I can call my credit card company and do a charge-back.

This lens is not consistent with the rest of the EX lens lineup. I think it's reasonable to expect comparable quality with this lens, as compared with the stock lens. This lens fails to deliver on that. In another forum, someone commented that the 8XS samples gave them a headache. I think that sums it up nicely. This lens goes back. I can use the money to buy a conversion lens and a NanoFlash..
 
Just for curiosity, did you enable the wide angle option in the EX-3 menu system? That is supposed to reduce CA with wide angle lens? Of course, that was designed long before the Fujinon wide angle appeared. I guess your only other option would be to rent a 1/2" Fujinon wide for your limo shoot. Or, dare I say it, shoot with a DSLR and wide lens.
 
I tried the wide adapter option in the menu, but that apparently only affects the calibration of the stabilizer, not the focus/CA correction. A lens rental would be $500 and I'd have to drive 50 miles each way to rent it, and get it back to them before the next rental period. Saturday is going to be a 16 hour day, starting at 6:45am so any extra complications like trying to rent a lens at 5am in New Haven is just not going to work out practically.
 
My friend the photographer just saw these frame grabs that I uploaded here, and he said about them, "it looks like they were shot with a lens you got from a box of Cracker Jacks!" LoL.. He's urging me to return it.
 
UPDATE:

I just received my Fujinon lens back from the Teaneck, NJ repair facility.

On the work order completion report they wrote:

SYMPTOM
Check for resolution and chromatic aberration: no history.

REPAIR SERVICE
No problem found: lens within Sony's factory HD optical MTF specs.



My thoughts: Sony must have some really slackard specs for lens quality.


Other news: I got an e-mail from them informing me that I sent the loaner lens back to their Wayne, NJ address, not their Teaneck, NJ address. The problem is, the Wayne, NJ address is the only one they ever gave me in our e-mail communications, so it never occured to me that the loaner had to go back to a different address. I hope that does not raise a problem with crediting my card.
 
The whole think just stinks Mark. You would have been better off buying a HMC-150 for wide shots and still had 1,000.00 left over! Or if you would have traveled to B&H in NY and actually tried the lens out in the store.

Is there still a chance you are doing something wrong with your camera settings? Have you found any other EX3 owners with the same lens to compare notes with? And where did you get 4 grand when you were worried about being on the streets a month or 2 ago? LOL.
 
Well, I could have bought a HVX200 and gotten that degree of clarity..
You never see the flaws in the store. The only way to spot the differences is on a proper monitor, under real life conditions, not the artificial lighting setups they have in stores. And of course you need to be able to switch lenses and download footage to compare on a large monitor. I much doubt B&H even had a lens to try out, as they don't stock this lens.

I wish I were doing something wrong, but there's only one way to attach the lens to the camera, and I did the flangeback adjustments each time (note: it only has to be performed once with each new lens. Subsequent switches between familiar lenses result in full focus, or the same result as if flangeback were executed again).

I see Andy Shipsides' example image also has this ugly artifact, possibly even worse than mine, so no, it's not my camera, and it's not my level of competence. My training is in the field of engineering and I do have optical physics background from when I was an applications engineer working with lasers and optics in the 1970s. I think that qualifies me to judge a lens. :)

The four grand came from CitiBank. But don't tell anyone we're running our company on Obamanomics. ;)
 
Oh well.I only mentioned the HMC-150 because it comes with the widest stock lens of any of these new HD cameras. You could do the limo shots with that and save the EX3 for the other stuff.

Best of luck overcoming this unfortunate SNAFU.
 
Does it cover a 90° field of view?

It's a tough choice.. if I look in the viewfinder, I can't see the flaws in this lens. But when I bring it up on the NLE and play it at 1:1 pixel ratio, it makes me feel sick, like I got a raw deal on a sub-par lens. If I want a really good wide, I may have no options, unless I want to shell out 14 grand for the next model up wide angle lens.

This lens MIGHT be okay for closeup interviews in tight spaces, or for extreme action shooting from helicopters, but for sweeping landscape shots and architectural filming, it's just no good, as your eye follows the arcs of the support beams of the roof trusses and--"hey, what's that red and blue line running along the truss?" Nah, it's not going to work for that. I was planning on doing more architectural work with this lens. That's not gonna happen now.
 
Here's a screen grab of one frame in FCP:

http://masterdigital.com/ucm.jpg

I had just gotten the wide angle lens and the EX3 when this shot was made; I may have been stopped down quite a bit here (so there is diffraction). Since then I've shot more open than f/4.8 and the results are somewhat better re diffraction. FYI + FWIW.

For $4K, I didn't expect too much; before Katrina/levee collapse I had a 4.4 x 44mm Fujinon for a 2/3" DVCAM, and that lens was four times more expensive - that was an SD camera.

In short, I'm not happy with the EX3 wide angle lens either, but I'm more annoyed with the zoom stutter which occurs in both the normal and the wide angle lenses designed for this camera.

Hope this helps.

Parker Dinkins
www.masterdigital.com
 
Your example is greatly-reduced in size, but still shows some CA artifacts.

I know that the lens is not that expensive by broadcast standards, but neither is the stock lens, and it is nearly-perfect in these regards.

Doesn't it bother you that the wide angle lens is so much softer than your stock lens, and doesn't it bother you that it has CA and your stock lens is pretty much free from CA?

I can live with a little zoom stutter, but I can't live with poor images.

Thanks for posting a sample. Could you post some more samples, but at full 1080P resolution?

If I were making twenty or thirty grand a year in this business, I suppose I might keep the lens, just as another option in my bag of tricks, but I don't have the budget to allow this much money to be wasted on an inferior lens that I will probably seldem use due to the fact that I can't stand looking at its output.
 
Ok, here are the previous one and more images at full size, using maximum quality JPG compression:

http://masterdigital.com/ucm.jpg
http://masterdigital.com/wide.jpg
http://masterdigital.com/medium.jpg
http://masterdigital.com/tele.jpg

The last three are from the same point of view, and the zoom descriptions are approximate.

Again, I don't recall the f/stop that was used, but I can get sharper images (100% subjective analysis here) when I consciously use an f/stop of about f/4.0 or f/4.8. I do not shoot at f/1.9 unless conditions absolutely require it.

Now, what I would really like to see is a few examples of what the big time (i.e. more expensive) 1/2" Fujinon lens will do under similar circumstances.

Parker Dinkins
www.masterdigital.com
 
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Thank you, Parker. Those examples look pretty much like what I'm getting from my lens, in terms of the CA and sharpness.

I spent all evening yesterday, trying different methods of running flangeback adjustments, using the target at different distances on different surfaces. Apparently this lens is more sensitive to distance and it is necessary to move the camera even further from the target than for the stock lens, to get a better backfocus adjustment. I did some tests in-studio and found that the lens was sharpest at full tele, but not quite as sharp at wide.

I finally ended up doing a full reset on the camera, then doing another flangeback from a long distance from the target. The lens was noticeably sharper at full wide after that, so I saved the lens data, recalled the camera data with all my PPs, and reloaded the saved lens data. The backfocus seemed to be maintained this time, as verified by another test shot and pulling still frames. It didn't help the CA problem one bit though I think the clarity may be improved. I have to shoot some outdoor scenes of buildings to really make a better comparison, but I think I made some minor inroads with improving the lens performance a bit.

I spent hours playing with every option on the lens menu, even turning off the lens compensation data. (I also confirmed what the flare adjustments do, after extensive experimentation--they compensate for the 'fog' that you get when a bright light is cast upon the lens, in all three primaries.)

I hope to do some outdoor test shots later today, if the weather improves and lighting is similar to my other shots to see if I REALLY affected an improvement in clarity. Prior to this, the lens was barely resolving 800 lines on a 1956 chart.
 
About a third more distance than the recommended.


I brought this lens with me to a wedding rehearsal on Friday. Since I wanted to have the ability to do slo-mo smoothly in post at any time in the video, I decided to shoot the whole event in 720P/60. What I discovered, is that the differences in sharpness between this lens and stock become a wash at 720P. And the extra width and rectilinearity were almost breathtaking in the old gothic style St Peter Church.

The difference between the field of view on the EX1 and this EX3 with this wide lens becomes significant. The narrower EX1 footage just lacks that cinematic broadness that the wide lens brings in. And the Byzantine/Gothic columns were nice and straight. A converter lens would have made them so curved as to be ridiculous-looking.

This is all going to DVD, where the lens MTF won't matter much, since 85% of the resolution is thrown out anyway.

The lens is looking slightly better after the camera reset and using the longer distance to the Seimens chart, though it's still not in the same league with the stock lens for absolute to-the-pixel clarity when shooting 1080P. But for 720P, it's done a pretty respectable job with the cathedral interiors and an exterior shot of the stone ediface in the late afternoon sun, against one of the deepest blue skies I've seen in a long time.

Another advantage of 720P is that the relatively low noise of the sensors is further integrated and reduced/softened. It looks less electronic and more filmlike, and practically invisible to the eye. I might have to throw in some noise in post as "dither" so white walls don't produce bands of color on the DVD. :)

I'm having a real tough time with this decision to keep or to return. This wedding shoot is likely to change my mind. The cathedral footage gained tremendously on those wide shots. That and the fact that those converter lens samples looked so gawdawful, is leaning me in favor of keeping this lens, even though it is far from perfect. The clients are never going to notice the imperfections--at least on the DVD. They'll appreciate the composition of the dramatic wide shots, and that's a plus, from a purely business point of view.

I guess I'll save my pennies and buy the $14,000 Fujinon 3.5 x 13 lens one day, for a more perfectly sharp lens, assuming it's any better than this one.
 
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