Review by Klaus Schroiff, published February 2022
Introduction
First of all, I’ve to admit something – I’m one of the oddballs who love fish-eye lenses. Not always but often.
Maybe it relates to the sea of conventional lenses that find their way into our lab and everything unusual is a welcome distraction. So in any case I have got a favorable bias. Thus the offer to review the new Tokina SZ 8mm f/2.8 Fish-Eye was very welcomed. It’s a fully manual, APS-C mount lens for X- and E-mount. The lens is very compact and lightweight – as it should be.
Fish-eye lenses are exotics and shouldn’t be a burden to carry around with your other gear. Available for less than $300/330EUR, it’s very reasonably priced, too.
The build quality of the Tokina SZ 8mm f/2.8 Fish-Eye is very nice indeed. It’s an all-metal construction with a smooth focus ring and a clickless aperture ring. There’s no wobbling whatsoever.
The lens hood can be detached to use with full-frame mirrorless cameras for achieving circular fisheye effect – that’s in E-mount only, of course, but we weren’t able to verify this with the X-mount version used for testing. However, it’s likely that it’ll produce some mechanical vignetting at the top & bottom as do other APS-C format 8mm-ish fisheye lenses when used on full-format cameras.
Due to the manual nature of the lens, there’s no EXIF data, no AF and no camera-controlled aperture. Given the immense depth-of-field. This is hardly an issue though. If you set the focus to ~1.5m and your average scene will be in focus even at f/2.8.
That being said – the lens allows you to focus down to 0.1m which allows an object magnification of 1:10.
That’s not too shabby for such a lens.
| Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Equivalent focal length (full-format) | “12mm” (Fish-eye) |
| Equivalent aperture (depth-of-field, full-format) | “f/4.2” |
| Optical construction | 11 elements in 9 groups |
| Number of aperture blades | 7 |
| min. focus distance | 0.1m (max. magnification 1:10) |
| Dimensions | 52.3×59.8mm |
| Weight | 280g |
| Filter size | – |
| Hood | petal-shaped (bayonet mount, detachable, supplied) |
| Other features | – |
| Mounts | Fujifilm X, Sony E |
Distortion
Imatest wasn’t able to produce a distortion figure for the lens … but, hey, it’s a fish-eye.
The sample image below may give you an impression about this though.
Vignetting
Sorry, no vignetting figures this time – there’s no reliable way for us to measure this with such a lens.
There is some obvious vignetting at large apertures as you may spot in our sample image section though.
MTF (resolution)
The resolution characteristic of the Tokina SZ 8mm f/2.8 Fish-Eye is fairly decent. At large aperture settings, you will easily see softness in the image corners (and the MTFs below don’t show our usual “extreme corner” figures this time because that’s almost impossible with such a lens). The center quality is excellent, however, and if you stop down to f/8 you should be a happy camper even with respect to corner quality.
The centering quality of the tested sample was good.
Please note that the MTF results are not directly comparable across the different systems!
Below is a simplified summary of the formal findings. The chart shows line widths per picture height (LW/PH) which can be taken as a measure for sharpness. If you want to know more about the MTF50 figures you may check out the corresponding Imatest Explanations.
Chromatic Aberrations (CAs)
The biggest weakness of the lens is lateral CAs. At 5px on average at the image borders, they are massive.
And without a built-in correction profile, you have to correct this in post-processing. Most RAW converters can still do it without drama though.
There’s also quite a bit of purple fringing. It’s more difficult to correct but at least Photoshop ACR was able to do it with manual guidance.
Flare
Flare is pretty well controlled. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to produce ghostings but you can drive all lenses into producing some.
Below is a worst-case scenario.
Sample Images
Competition
Whilst Fujifilm doesn’t offer a native fish-eye lens, the Tokina isn’t without competition. The most serious one is surely the Rokinon/Samyang 8mm F2.8 UMC Fish-eye II which also offers a more ambitious optical design. There are also a couple of lesser-known players such as the TTArtisan APS-C 7.5mm F2 Fisheye or the 7artisans 7.5mm F2.8 II MF Fisheye which are somewhat more affordable still. The bottom feeder is probably the Rockstar 10mm f/8 Fisheye lens.
I had quite some fun with the lens out there when producing the sample images - and for most of us, this is what photography is all about.
Yes, the Tokina SZ 8mm f/2.8 Fish-Eye isn't a perfect lens. This is most obvious in low-light situations where soft corners are obvious at large-aperture settings.
Some post-processing will be required to reduce the CAs, purple fringing and, maybe, vignetting. Once you stop down, the quality improves substantially.
The center is tack sharp anyway and the corners recover nicely at medium aperture settings.
The barrel distortion is massive, of course. You could de-fish your images but then why would you want to do so. Fish-eye images are awesome as is. 🙂
While you can produce aperture artifacts in your images when shooting into the sun, the lens is fairly flare-resistant within its scope.
The build quality is very good thanks to an all-metal construction and smooth controls. However, it's an all manual lens.
Due to the immense depth-of-field, this is nothing to be afraid of normally. The clickless aperture is surely appreciated by video makers.
Photographers may not like it as much but yours truly had no problems with this. This isn't an action lens anyway.
Fish-eye lenses aren't everybody's cookie but if you are a believer, the Tokina SZ 8mm f/2.8 Fish-Eye is an option that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
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Optical Quality
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Build Quality
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Price / Performance