I’ll be honest, I tend to prefer primes lenses over zooms, especially long telephoto zooms. May be that just comes down to having previously used prime telephotos (I owned Nikon 300mm f/2.8 and 600mm f/4 for a while).
But, a few years ago when I switched to Fujifilm from Nikon, there really was no option in the long telephoto space, apart from Fuji’s own 100-400mm lens, unless I wanted to try an adapted manual focus lens, which I didn’t. That wasn’t really a problem since part of the reason to change was reducing the weight of my gear, so I plumped for the Fujifilm lens.
But, I’ve never been totally enamoured with the 100-400mm. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is an excellent lens, I just felt that a prime would deliver better imagery out at the long end, and that is mainly where I use this lens, at 400mm. With most tele-zooms, sharpness and contrast do tend to fall away at that long end.
Enter the Fringer EF-FX Pro II adapter. This neat little adapter, about the size of a typical 1.4x tele-converter, allows a Canon EF lens to be attached to a Fujifilm X series camera, whilst retaining auto-focus and exposure. The Pro version adds a nicely detented ring which can control the Canon lens aperture and feeds back the aperture information to the camera body. It all works very well.
The possibility to use a Canon telephoto opens up a world of options, my original intention being to hire super telephotos, or even a tilt-shit lens, as and when required. But when a used Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM lens came up in mint condition at a very reasonable price, I thought I would give it a try. For those who don’t know, this lens is an old and simple optical design dating from the ‘90’s, but is very well regarded for it’s portability, sharpness and solid construction.
Of course the elephant-in-the-room is the lack of image stabilisation. I guess there are two answers here: one, I personally don’t value this so much as mostly my subjects for this lens will be moving, and two, if you really must have this then either go for a Fujifilm X-H1 body (which has in-body stabilisation) or a different Canon lens with IS (note although IS is supported by the Fringer adapter, only the lenses tested by them are supported - there is a list on their website).
Milo helps with testing the Canon 400mm EF f/5.6 L USM & Fringer EF-FX Pro II, Fujfilm X-T2 (straight out of camera jpeg, cropped to 1:1, handheld).
Another factor that might put people off is the smallish aperture and the ability to get those super-soft backgrounds so your main subject ‘pops’ out of the image. Well, yes, it’s very easy to get that blurry background with a long f/2.8 or f/4 lens, but the downside is depth of field is often so shallow, you will need to absolutely nail focus, not just on your subject, but on a particular part of the your subject. Sometimes this is such a challenge you will find yourself stopping down to give yourself some margin for error in focus anyway.
But even if limited to f/5.6 as your widest aperture, you can get a nice effect: in the image above I got down low to maximise the separation between subject and background. The cat is about 6 meters away, behind him is a wall a further 75cm away. It also helps that the wall was thrown into shadow. Fortunately his face is fairly parallel to the sensor plane, but look how out of focus that extended paw is!
Bottom line is I was impressed with the image quality of the Canon 400mm, and AF performance was very good with the Fringer adapter on the Fujifilm X-T2 (it was also good with the Canon 85mm f/1.8 and 100mm f/2.8 USM macro I tried).
However, to be fair, in my comparative tests the Fujifilm 100-400mm stood up very well indeed. So, I wouldn’t necessarily choose between these options purely on image quality, both are capable of very good image quality. But, if you want to use longer focal lengths, the Fringer adapter unlocks a world of options not available in the Fujifilm system.
Personally, I preferred the handling of the Canon lens. Weight wise, there is little in it once you add in the 140g Fringer - the Canon just edges it but only by about 60g. However, the longer slimmer body of the Canon to my mind is easier to grip and the wider spacing of your hands seems to make it easier to hold steady. To me, it feels more wieldy and perhaps would be a better option for birds-in-flight, for example.
At first sight, the Fujifilm looks more compact….
….but with hoods extended and at 400mm, there is not much in it.
The Canon wins on build, it feels more sturdy because of the metal lens hood, the solid lens barrel (i.e. no extension) and the overall ‘cleaner’ design (i.e. less switches). That’s not to say the Fujifilm isn’t well built, it is, but it just doesn’t feel like it would take as much of a beating as the Canon would. Not much of surprise, given they are close in weight but the Fujifilm has 21 elements to the Canon’s mere 7.
Of course, as mentioned the Canon has no IS, and minimum focus is quite far out at 3.5m (by contrast the Fujfilm gets comfortably under 2m). It also will not auto-focus on the Fringer adapter with the Canon 1.4x extender. The standard lens foot has no arca dovetail and only one mounting bolt, but that is pretty common, indeed the same can be said of the Fujfilm 100-400mm.
For frequent tripod use I would swop out the standard foot for an iShoot replacement (£20), that, despite being no bigger than the Canon foot, has two threaded mounting holes plus a hole for an alignment pin, and also has an arca dovetail on the base. If feels well made and seems solid on first impressions.
The Canon lens come as new with a nice padded bag, and most good used one’s should include that as well. It still accommodates the lens with the Fringer adapter attached.
So to conclude, if you are lusting after longer lenses for your Fujifilm, then for the cost of the Fringer (£300) and a used Canon 400mm (from £500 - £700), you are looking at a considerable saving over a new Fujifilm 100-400, and potentially a small saving on a used one, plus you open an array of Canon lenses for your Fuji camera.
In the end, I did sell my Fujifilm 100-400, with enough to fund the Canon lens and the Fringer, plus a small profit on the deal.
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