Zeiss Touit 2.8/12mm - Stefan Czurda
I absolutely love 12 mm (18 mm equivalent in full frame terms) as a focal length for landscape photography.
Being nether too close, nor too wide, 12 mm offer a perfect wide angle view without showing too much distortion.
Here I would like to review the Fuji X-Mount version of the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 mm lens.
For this, I mounted the lens on my Fuji XE-4 APS-C camera and took it with me on several trips to the alps.
Here you find a review focusing on optical qualities of the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 and also some impressions from my trips to Berchtesgaden, Hallstatt and the Schladminger Tauern.
Lens Properties
For outdoor purposes, the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 is not particularly a small lens, primarily due to its wide tulip-shaped appearance and its massive lens hood, which I removed on my mountain trips.
Without the hood, however, the Touit has a reasonable weight and size as a companion on a mountain trip when mounted on my compact Fuji XE-4 camera.
Being mainly built from metal, the built quality has very high standards, as I would have expected it from a Zeiss lens.
The aperture ring on the lens clicks gently, but has a little too loose resistance in my opinion which may accidentally lead to unwanted changes in the aperture settings.
The autofocus is a little slow compared to modern Fuji XF-lenses. However, considering it's nine year old age, it still works fine for landscape photography.
Optical qualities
With a largest aperture of f/2.8, the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 can be considered a fast lens, which is particularly good for outdoor photography in low light situations.
Image quality wide open at f/2.8 is decent and the lens shows good sharpness in the center. However, critical corner regions appear a little softer at f/2.8, but are generally fine and totally usable at this aperture.
Full size image at f/2.8
Softer corner regions wide open at f/2.8
Stopped down to f/4-5.6, corner sharpness increases and remains exceptionally well until f/11, when refraction comes into play.
Color Rendering
Personally, I think no other manufacturer does better than Zeiss in terms of color representation.
Lenses from the German manufacturer are very well known for their very pleasing and cooler color rendering and the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 is no exception from that.
Together with the less saturated „Classic Chrome“ film simulation profile on my Fuji-XE4 applied on my RAWs during post processing, I doubt that color rendering can get any better for my landscape photography.
Color rendering is perfect
Bokeh
A 18 mm wide angle lens may be not the best tool for foreground-background separation, however, if close enough to your main subject, blurry background are still possible.
On the following pictures, near and far distance bokeh rendering is shown.
Near distance bokeh
Far distance bokeh
Although not bad at all, the bokeh appears a bit nervous and is definitely not a strength of the lens.
Vignetting and Distortion
Wide open at f/2.8, the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 shows moderate vignetting, but corner shading almost completely disappears when stopped down to f/4.
Also, the lens shows modest barrel distortion, which can be easily correct using a lens correction profile in Lightroom.
Vignetting and distortion before Lightroom corrections
Vignetting and distortion after Lightroom corrections
Chromatic Aberration and Backlight
I found the lens pretty well corrected in terms of chromatic aberration. Even in critical light situations, I couldn’t see any dramatic purple fringing.
Chromatic Aberrations
Also, the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 shows good performance in backlight situation. Flaring is definitely present, but in my opinion is really pleasing and ads some nice character to the lens.
Flaring
Further, the lens displays pretty sunstars that start to appear at f/8 and become even more pronounced from f/11 to f/22.
Sunstars
Conclusion
The lens has the most beautiful color rendering that I have seen so far on the Fuji X-Mount system.
For an outdoor lens, I personally didn’t enjoy the overall size of the Touit, the massive lens hood (which I didn’t use) and the little too loose resistance of the aperture ring.
However, despite these drawbacks, the Zeiss Touit 2.8/12 is an impressive lens with high optical qualities and a very good tool for outdoor photography.
Finally, I would like to show some more impressions from the Alps that were taken with this lens.
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