Fujifilm X10 Review
Lens
The Fujifilm X10 has a non-interchangeable 4x zoom lens of very high quality. The zoom range goes from 28mm to 112mm (24x36mm format equivalent) and the zoom ring is interestingly-enough marked with these focal lengths, although the real physical focal length range of this lens is from 7.1 mm to 28.4 mm. The zoom range can be extended by 2x through digital zoom.
The lens has a fast maximum aperture of f/2 at the wide end and f/2.8 at the telephoto end. It has 11 lens elements, three of which are aspherical. It has a 7-blade aperture for smooth bokeh; however, due to the small sensor size, there isn't much bokeh to be seen (as our tests will show).
The lens has a zoom ring on the lens barrel so zooming is precise and without lag, so it's much better than what you find on your typical point and shoot camera.
All in all, the lens and its operation is in our opinion what sets this camera apart from the crowd of point and shoot cameras. The only thing we would have wished for is a manual focus ring, as manual focus via the secondary control wheel is sluggish and feels indirect.
The camera it turned on by rotating the zoom ring to the 28mm mark, an operation which doubles the length of the lens. The lens then retracts a bit up to about a 45mm (eqv.) focal length and then extends again out to the 112mm mark.
One benefit of the lens being non-interchangeable is of course that the nuisance of getting dust on the sensor is eliminated.
Field of View
As we already mentioned, the zoom corresponds to a 28-112 mm lens in the 24x36mm format, and 18.5 to 75mm in the APS-C format. In other words, this zoom range is more than adequate in most situations and covers the most common focal lengths.
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| 28 mm (eqv.) | 35 mm (eqv.) |
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| 50 mm (eqv.) | 85 mm (eqv.) |
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| 112 mm (eqv.) |
Click on each thumbnail to enlarge the image (900 x 600).
Distortion
The lens exhibits some distortion at the two widest settings, 28mm and 35mm (eqv.), but it is very slight and not a factor in most images. When shooting JPG, it appears that the camera corrects the distortion (although not perfectly; this feature is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation). The Fuji RAW converter includes sliders for correcting distortion but doesn't appear to be pre-programmed with the correction required for the this lens.
| Uncorrected (from RAW file) | Corrected in camera (JPG file) |
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| 28 mm (eqv.) | 28 mm (eqv.) |
 |  |
| 35 mm (eqv.) | 35 mm (eqv.) |
 |  |
| 50 mm (eqv.) | 50 mm (eqv.) |
 |  |
| 85mm (eqv.) | 85mm (eqv.) |
 |  |
| 112mm (eqv.) | 112mm (eqv.) |
