A Zoom for my XE-1. .

Hello everyone. After decades of Minox thru 8x10's & about 8 years of "Pro" point & shoots, I have jumped into mirrorless with the XE-1. Presently I have adapted my Jupiter-8 to the camera & it seems to work nicely. My only "problem" is that this lens is like a 100mm tele on the image format. No problem with the tripod, but not the ideal for tight, crowd work.

Here's my request: Pass along some info about the potential use of a 25-70mm (ball park figure) zoom on the camera. Since there are adapters galore for the camera, any make & model will do as I "usually" find my older equipment on Ebay.

Aloha, Bill

There is a guy selling mint Fuji 16-50mm kit zooms in classified. - $125? - I got one and an X-E1 and consider the FUJI OIS glass "nice to have" not just for shooting convenience. With all the digital corrections the camera is capable of the results look quite satisfying on a 4K screen.

IDK much about great zooms by other brands. Canon's 24-70/2.8 Mk II has a good reputation but how adaptable will it be? Can you operate it's aperture at all on a Fuji?

Vintage manual glass: There seems to be Leica R fetching insane prices. Angenieux?

Bread & butter: Beware, forget it, run. <- I mean the range of 1980s consumer film zooms.

I've been unhappy with Tokina ATX 35-70/2.8 (2 copies both soft) Pentax 28-80/3.5-4.5 (one early death another alive, both not great on digital) Sigma 28-85 manual and 28-70 AF. - I'd rather adapt a crop DSLR kit zoom. - Nikon maybe? But considering that kit zooms probably go around 50 €/$ and adapters for another 17, I really recommend paying twice as much for an original Fuji with OIS.

I believe you can forget about using any EOS lenses or any modern zoom lens that does not have a manual aperture ring, since there would be no practical way to adjust the working aperture. Perhaps there are are more recent Nikon, Pentax or minolta zoom lenses with manual aperture rings, but I am no expert in those brands. I would agree with Jochen that the quality of vintage manual standard zooms (like 28-70mm) would likely be less than ideal, especially when you can so easily see into the corners of those 16mp files at 1:1 magnification. Primes from that era would likely be just fine though. I am a firm believer in using native lenses for a modern mirrorless camera, and as suggested above, the Fuji 16-50mm, or even better the Fuji 18-55 kit lenses both have AF, IS, and auto aperture features, and would be a very practical solution for general photo use.

Thanks for the input Ken and Jochen. I did go over to the Classified thread & purchased the last lens on sale, so in a week I will have the "official" XE-1 set up. In todays mail was the Minolta MD-FX adapter & it was mated with both the 50mm & 135mm Celtic lenses from my XD-1. Both work very nice & the 135mm will be used when my Sports Car & Go-Kart racing events start on the mainland. That Celtic is an almost perfect 250mm long lens!

Aloha, Bill

Just for your info and calculations, the "crop factor" of the Fuji is 1,5x. So a 135mm lens gives a crop similar to a 200mm lens on 135 film, the 50mm is like a 75mm. A normal lens would be around 30-35mm somewhere on the Fuji.

There are adapters for some lens mounts available that "undo" this crop factor, but these have additional lenses inside and do tend to cost a whole lot more.