Fujinon 55mm f2.2 Review, a Bokeh Monster

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Contents: Build Quality | Bokeh | Sharpness | Color Rendering | Conclusion

On a random day, fueled by boredom and a bit of the old gear acquisition syndrome, I stumbled across a thread regarding film-era m42-mount lenses with unique bokeh. One of the lenses that stood out to me was the Fujinon 55mm f2.2. I browsed through pics that had been taken with the lens on Flickr, liked what I saw and headed to eBay to see what I could turn up. I found a copy of the lens mounted to an old Fujica ST-605 SLR body for a really decent price and took the plunge.

When the camera and lens arrived, my mood shifted rapidly from excitement to dismay. The lens not only had all the characteristic splits in the bakelite parts of the lens body, the focusing helicoid was completely and totally seized. I’ve never had the bad luck of buying a lens online that arrived in such poor condition. Not to worry, I took to Youtube, found a video of the lens being disassembled (thankfully in such a shape as my copy of the lens so I could use the author’s methods to get the darn thing apart) and fully disassembled, cleaned, re-lubed, reassembled, calibrated, disassembled, reassembled and by the end of that afternoon held a perfectly functional–if slightly ugly–copy of the Fujinon 55mm f2.2!

Build Quality

Terrible. It’s probably the worst-constructed lens I’ve ever personally used. The outer casing of the lens body–the aperture ring, indicator ring, and focus ring–are all bakelite (the focus ring having a thin rubber band grip around the bakelite). Now, I’ll caveat that plastic isn’t the worst material to use in the construction of lenses. Some modern plastics are incredibly durable and absolutely make better choices for construction material compared to metals.

Bakelite, however, is not a modern plastic. It’s a plastic resin comprised of wood alcohol and coal tar originally designed over a century ago by a fellow named Leo Hendrik Baekeland. Bakelite does have good strength characteristics, but where it is lacking is in impact resistance, flexibility, and becomes incredibly brittle and prone to breaking as it ages. As mentioned in the introduction, my copy of this lens had multiple cracked components. The indicator ring fell apart when the set screws were removed (which ultimately helped in the disassembly of the seized helicoid), and the focusing ring was essentially only held together by the rubber grip. I cobbled it back together with aluminum tape and superglue, but the point stands that it was the worst condition I’ve ever received a lens in, a consequence of the poor material choice Fujifilm made 50 years ago.

The internal construction was odd as well. The focusing helicoid is aluminum instead of brass. The method that the focusing ring is held to the helicoid is also incredibly janky: four screws clamp the focusing ring to the helicoid… with the edge of the screw and not through holes in the focusing ring. As a consequence of its strange internal construction you have to calibrate the lens to focus to infinity by removing the focusing ring and adjusting the internal/external focusing helicoid locations by screwing the internal focusing helicoid in or out from the external focusing helicoid. The process requires trial and error, and I called it good enough on the fourth attempt when the lens landed somewhere past infinity when set to infinity on the focusing ring.

Overall, F tier construction, materials, and overall design. Being plastic with aluminum internals, this is a very light vintage lens for what that’s worth.

Bokeh

This is what we’re talking about, why I bought this lens in the first place. The bokeh. I never messed with any of the typical “soap bubble” bokeh lenses before, but hot damn, the out of focus character this lens produces is wild. The first thing I noted was that the conditions of the shot dictate the quality of the blur. If the background has soft, smooth lighting it is a relatively mild-mannered lens and behaves well, creating smooth bokeh. It might not be creamy smooth, but smoother than I expected going in. If you have a busy background with low-ish contrast lighting the background becomes hectic, nervous, and busy. Add high contrast or specular highlights and the soap bubble bokeh is in full effect.

While the bokeh was the reason I bought the lens, and while the bokeh is always fairly distinct from more refined lens designs, it provides value in adding an impressionistic character to images. Even the busiest, most nervous and chaotic backgrounds can look interesting with this lens. I’m absolutely satisfied in this lens as an artistic tool and absolute bokeh MACHINE!

Sharpness

The sharpness lands in the “good enough” range, even when evaluating it against other vintage lenses. It has a fairly slow f2.2 maximum aperture, and when shot wide open is comparable to my fast fifty holy grail lens, the Pentax Super Takumar 50mm f1.4 wide open. That’s not great for a slow 50mm optic, but saying that it wasn’t quite as bad as I expected from other reviews of the lens. I was expecting much softer, so even though its not great for a slow lens, it did exceed my initial expectations. Stopped down to f8 it seems to perform its best and is comparable to any other high quality 50mm lens from the 70s.

tower | monochrome
tower through the trees | monochrome
An example of a shot wide-open at f2.2 and a shot stopped down at f8. Focused on the tower in the background. You can see there is a sufficient amount of detail in the center of frame wide open, and how much the lens cleans up when stopped down.

One odd note is that the corner sharpness, especially wide open, was unexpectedly bad. I’m shooting this lens on an ASP-C sized sensor in the Fujifilm X-S10, and the corners are soft as can be. Given that this lens was purchased as an artistic bokeh tool, that’s not a deal breaker at all. Stop down to f5.6 or f8 and it's sharp enough in the corners. It is something to be taken into consideration if you’re looking at purchasing this lens.

Color Rendering

I haven’t found color rendition to be the strong suit for this lens. It’s… fine. Colors are a bit dull and lean towards being overly warm (probably a byproduct of the thoriated glass yellowing over time). I have been using this lens for black and white quite a bit. The subdued colors are kind of nice, and give a vintage film era look to be sure, so there’s a time and place for that, but monochrome has been my jam with this lens for the most part.

Conclusion

Overall I quite like this lens for the purpose I bought it for: the bokeh. If I’m going to grab a film-era lens for general purpose stuff I’ll probably grab my m42 mount Pentaxs.

Written on Wednesday, 17 July 2024, by Aaron Brown. Last edited on


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