10 Nov 2024 4 min read

FUJINON XF70-300mm F4-5.6 R LM OIS WR

Earlier this year, I bought into the Fujfilm ecosystem with a Fujifilm XT-5. I've really enjoyed it these last few months, I've taken thousands of photos and have loved the process of getting out and potentially finding good photo opportunities, and if I don't? That's okay - it was usually a good day out either way.

I'm still very early on in learning how to take decent photos, but one thing I have continually run into since buying the XT-5 with the 16-50mm lens, is that I constantly wanted more.. reach.

Maybe this is showing my lack of experience and skills, but I also do like the framing and compression that a longer focal length provides in many situations.

So the options I had narrowed it down to were:

Fuji's XF 70-300mm
Fuji's XF 100-400mm
Tamron's 18-300mm

As per the title, I chose the 70-300 - but I'll note down why I decided against the other two:

Fuji's 100-400mm
- Over twice the RRP of the 70-300. (£750 vs £1699).
- It has a few advantages including reach, but in terms of image quality at equivalent focal lengths, they seem to be very similar.
- A lot larger and heavier.
- Overall, just beyond what I need or want in terms of size, weight and practicality even before you consider the price.
Tamron's 18-300mm
- Good price - can get it for roughly £500-550 new and even cheaper used.
- But the quality didn't seem quite as good as the Fuji in a few noticeable areas, including with stabilisation.
- The ability to go from 18-300 is great in terms of versatilely, but there are trade offs for that.

The Fuji 70-300 gets great reviews, is an okay price, and seems to hold its used value really well. I struggled to find it used anywhere for much more than £100 off retail price. I settled on buying it new just for the extra warranty.

Impressions

This is not an actual review, I'm not going into the technical specs, running tests for lens sharpness at different apertures and focal lengths, I'm not looking at the quality of the bokeh or how much diffraction there is at smaller apertures, none of it.

I just want to share how it fits into my photography and my overall impressions of it.

Ergonomics

At 580g, it's reasonably light for its focal length - it's not too large. It fits in my small Peak Design Everyday Sling 3L along with my 16-50 and the camera. It's tight, but it fits. Which is good, because I don't want to have to carry a larger bag around in certain circumstances.

It has a plastic construction, but is weather sealed and feels high quality. The aperture ring and zoom resistance is satisfying. It has a zoom lock to prevent lens creep, but the resistance is such that it hasn't felt required - but it's good to know if it deteriorates - there's a fallback. I like that you can override the zoom lock without manually clicking it though.

The focus ring feels a bit light and numb, but that may be a personal preference thing. It's a very marginal complaint either way. It seems to be a common thing with Fuji's lenses.

Image quality

I have been very happy with what I've been able to get out of this lens, from both photography and video. I had loaned a copy from the excellent Fuji loan programme, which offers a 2 day free loan (and a 7 day at a decent price). I enjoyed that lens, but I think it may have suffered a bit of damage that wasn't that obvious because at 300mm it would look a fair bit fuzzier than what I see on the new lens I bought.

I'm not going to provide a bunch of photos of brick walls or test sheets to anaylse the characteristics of the lens. I'll drop a few photo samples below of cases which I believe showcase the lens reasonably well, at least for a beginner such as myself.

They're entirely focused on animal subjects, but a big motivation for the purchase was landscapes - I just haven't been in many good conditions for landscape shots recently.

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These are quite heavily compressed and resized as the gallery feature I'm using here doesn't seem to respect my config to stop resizing the images. But hopefully you get the idea of what the lens can do, even if you're losing a decent amount of sharpness in the compression.

All straight out of camera JPEGs, no other post-processing. Three were taken in dim fading light as a quick test on the day I bought the lens, so the quality isn't great.

I have taken a few videos with this too and I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality. The optical image stabilisation combined with the in body stabilisation works really well for both photography and video.

Overall, I'm very pleased with what this enables me to do with my camera. Lenses are expensive, but I don't regret this - yet. If I do, I'm confident the resale value will hold up.