HD lens - Canon vs. Fuji

Michael Brown · September 7, 2004

I work with a production company that will be shooting HD over in Nepal this November and stumbled across this website. Wish I had found it sooner and any information you all might have is appreciated.

We're going to be shooting with a Sony 750 camera. Back in 2001 we carried one of these to summit of Everest and used amongst others, a Canon 9x5.5 lens - think it was the widest available back then.

We were looking to get the same lens for this upcoming shoot because it was such an important part of the previous shoot and yeilded fantastic results. Instead we've come across the newer Canon 11x4.7 and also a host of people saying that the Fuji's are the way to go as they breathe less than the Canons. Canon says that the 4.7 is the widest available, but there's a Fuji that's a 4.3 I think.

Then there's the choice of a CINE vs. ENG (seperate from the Canon vs. Fuji question) - this one seems easy as the Eng is easier to operate and more automated. And we are NOT going for the film look, instead we want a large depth of field and we'll be shooting 1080i.

Realize this is a long one, but any insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

David

David Mullen ASC · September 8, 2004

I find the Canon and Fuji HD zoom lenses to be similar enough to hardly make a difference which you choose -- however, I have no experience taking them to Everest! There might be extreme temperature performance to consider. I did take a Fujinon zoom to St. Petersburg, Russia in the winter and it worked fine.

The shorter Canon and Fujinon zooms (that started around 5.5mm) hardly breathed anyway -- the problem was always with the longer ones like the 7.8-144mm.

The question is whether you need to go wider than 5.5mm - that's pretty wide-angle!

Jason McKelvey · September 9, 2004

We own a Canon HJex21x7.5 HD lens and I'm not really happy with the breathing. I wish I could have seen if the Fuji was better at the breathing problem. Other than that, it's is very sharp through the whole frame and has an anti-ramping feature that puts an electronic end stop right before the lens falls off at the end... nice feature; plus custom programmable zoom curves. There's a tiny LCD screen on the lens where you program all this with menus. All this I'm sure is on the wide-angle version in the same line.

For what it's worth,

Michael Brown · September 9, 2004

Thanks for your imput guys - going to test both the canon and the fuji out on tuesday hopefully - will let you know what we think. Consensus is that the Fuji's might just edge out the Canon's, although haven't had any first hand experience with that Canon 4.7, which is supposed to be pretty great.

Cheers,

David

Armin Siegwarth · July 3, 2008

Hello out there,

even with this being an quite old discussion I like to know if someone compared the canon HJ 11x4,7 to the HA 13x4.5 fujinon. I am looking for buying two ENG Style 2/3" HD lenses and do not know what to do. Its pretty hard to compare this lenses because they are hardly availble. Canon has a backorder of 300 pieces for the 4.7 so they will not be able to show me one to compare.

I've been on a shoot with the Canon HJ21x7.5 and the Canon HJ11x4.7.

The 21 seemd to be quite good with little breathing. The salesman at canon told me its the same glass as the cinestyle ones. And is not as heavy as the comparable Fujinon.

The 4.7 has quite some barrel distortion which wasn't that nice.

On the other hand there are the Canon 22x7.6 and other Fujinon lenses made for broadcast that are lighter and a bit cheaper. On this forum I found a few posts concerning much breathing on the 17x lenses - I think it was the Fujinons. But probably Canons would do also.

So: did anyone compare 2/3" ENG Style zoomlenses? In particular of edge sharpness, distortion, light fall off, chromatic abrasion and so on.

I know here are mainly film people and not so much TV people, but I can't find another forum that has quite experienced guys that know what they are talking about...

Cheers

Armin

Bruce Greene · July 9, 2008

I work with a production company that will be shooting HD over in Nepal this November and stumbled across this website. Wish I had found it sooner and any information you all might have is appreciated.

We're going to be shooting with a Sony 750 camera. Back in 2001 we carried one of these to summit of Everest and used amongst others, a Canon 9x5.5 lens - think it was the widest available back then.

We were looking to get the same lens for this upcoming shoot because it was such an important part of the previous shoot and yeilded fantastic results. Instead we've come across the newer Canon 11x4.7 and also a host of people saying that the Fuji's are the way to go as they breathe less than the Canons. Canon says that the 4.7 is the widest available, but there's a Fuji that's a 4.3 I think.

Then there's the choice of a CINE vs. ENG (seperate from the Canon vs. Fuji question) - this one seems easy as the Eng is easier to operate and more automated. And we are NOT going for the film look, instead we want a large depth of field and we'll be shooting 1080i.

Realize this is a long one, but any insight would be much appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

David

Hi David,

I have the Fuji 4.5-59mm lens. It's quite good, but I don't know how it compares to Canon though.

The good:

4.5mm is very very wide and I've been surprised how many times I've used it.

No focus breathing (zooming while changing focus)

Long zoom range can make some interesting zooms.

The not so good:

Kind of soft at T1.8 but much better at 2.8-8.0

There is significant light falloff toward the corners of the image, especially at wide focal lengths and wide apertures. It often looks good for the image, but not always :)

There is significant chromatic abrasion at some focal lengths and apertures.

Overall:

I think the fuji is about as good as there is for a lens this compact and with this focal length range.

The "look" of the ENG version is exactly the same as the "Cine" version. The cine version (which I have) has no zoom motor or 2x extender, but is easier to focus by setting the distance scale. I think you will want the ENG version if the camera operator is doing his/her own focusing, especially if shooting handheld.

Sounds like a big adventure. Have a great trip!