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A Fantastic Addition to Ultra-Wide-Angle Collection
The first thing I notice is the typical XP great build quality, with the brushed metal body that is very nicely sized to fit the hand when holding on a camera. It comes with a brushed black metal lens cap that fits snugly on the front lens hood and a soft grey pouch. The manual focus rubber ring on the outside is very smooth and easy to focus through the optical view-finder or on the back screen. It has a metal lens hood along with electronic coupling to provide Exif data and aperture control via your camera. The lens also has a very wide frontal lens glass which even with the hard plastic petal lens hood edge it is still exposed to the elements such as rain, sleet, snow and bright strong direct light, but this again is a typical problem that you soon begin to get used to when using any wide lens by choosing when to take the photo or not usually by selective composition. And because of this design the lens does suffer a bit with lens flare and ghosting especially when in direct sunlight or very strong bright light sources.
The detail from this lens is incredible along with the sharpness from edge to edge, as seen in the slightly longer exposure at night bridge shot below. Notice the detail in the bottom corners!
ISO640, f/9, 1.6sec. Full-frame
I thought I would be nice to see how it worked on my Mirrorless APS-C Canon M3 camera which has had a Full-spectrum conversion to be able to capture Infrared Images. Again it works well giving a 16mm equivalent full-frame image.
Infrared Image at ISO100, f/11, 1/100sec. APS-c mirrorless full spectrum Canon M3
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