FujifilmFujinon XF18-120mmF4 LM PZ WR Lens

I bought this in order to do general A-roll filming in my workshop, woodworking and machining. I needed weather sealing and I wanted a zoom that didn't extend since they are typically prone to sucking air/ dust in. The 18-120 range is great and I can pickup a little extra range with the 1.29 crop option on my XT4 (standard with 4k60), it's perfect for filming woodworking and machining from a safe distance while maintaining good enough quality video for 4k. It does a funny thing while power zooming intermittently where the exposure 'jumps' noticeably which others have reported but I don't plan to do much zooming during video work and only short zoom ranges which seems to work well. The XT4's IBIS seems to work decently with it, no complaints so far. I don't need faster than F4 for what I want to do with it, I have a Samyang 12f2, Fuji 23 f2, and Fuji 50 f2 if I need narrower depth of field for b-roll, portraits, etc. Overall I can't complain and it fits my needs well for the price. I'd give it a 4.5 if that was an option, a 5 if the exposure jumping thing didn't occur since they advertise it as usable for zooming while shooting video.

The media could not be loaded. All-internal zoom, constant aperture, seamless zooming from 28-360mm FF=equivalent zoom range (on an XTrans V HR camera with digital zoom enabled)! Whacky, and cool, and the surprises don't stop there! Thanks to its' "space age polymer body", it's shockingly light! It's positively bristling with high quality feeling clicky buttons and smooth dials. Size\weight-wise, the XF 18-120/4 PZ vs Coca-Cola comparison pictured works out to the XF being roughly a half inch taller and 100g heavier? It's far lighter than it looks.My Sennheiser MKE-400 shotgun mic picks up zero AF noise from the LM motors, but the power-zoom is clearly but softly audible with or without my low-pass filter enabled. With a higher ambient noise level, I don't hear it when power-zooming in a slow "cinematic" speed, but it does sound like a faint "hearing test beep tone" at higher rates of zooming. I suspect that the PZ feature might be using a conventional DC motor instead of a piezo-electric LM...I don't have an XF 16-80 or 18-135 to compare it to, but I I'm pretty satisfied with the optical quality in this lens. At f4, it requires 8x as much light as my 1.4 primes, so it prefers to be an outdoor daylight kinda lens, but so far it seems like a keeper to me.

I purchased this almost the day it came out. I'm more used to prime lenses and just wanted something with a bit more reach. It's great for shooting in daylight and at night if you have flash or a light source. In hindsight, I should have spent a bit more and gone with a 50-140 f2.8. A wider lens allows for a bit more flexibility at night. Don't get me wrong, F4 is good, but this is much more for video than stills.