I have been looking to shoot with a 35mm equivalent lens for some time on my Fujifilm system, particularly on my EDC camera, the XT20. I didn’t want to go the whole hog on a Fuji prime lens without knowing (the secondhand market is weird at the moment) and I also wanted something with a bit of a vintage feel, but was not having much luck finding such a lens for a decent price. And then I stumbled on the Meike 25mm on the Cameraworld website, for an astonishingly low £45. A few quick moments of research later and it was on its way to me.
And I really like the results from my test shoot, a very early morning walk to try and catch the hot air balloons from the Bristol Balloon Fiesta (they went the wrong way). There’s a heaviness and a darkness to the resulting images reminiscent of a vintage look and feel. The centre is generally sharp, losing it towards the edges, dependent on the how open the lens is. The look and feel was also reflective of the reference images I had looked up, which was what attracted me to it in the first place. The lens is manual, without electronics, so focusing becomes harder the more you tend towards f16 as the viewfinder dims. Luckily the Fujifilm punch-in focus helps with that particular problem, as does the inevitable deeper depth of focus. The 25mm focal length works out to be 37.5mm in full frame equivalent, which I also like, slightly wider than the 35mm 1.4 (53mm ffe). The focusing is nice and smooth, I don’t like the de-clicked aperture ring, but I can live with it because of the cheap price and resulting images. They are very much my thing.
I think this will live on the XT20 for the foreseeable, the whole makes a nice compact system that is still ergonomically usable and eminently portable.
You can scroll through the sample images below, straight of the camera jpgs, Fujifilm Vivid film simulation.
