Fujifilm XF 18-55mm lens

The Fuji XF 18-55mm is a the only ‘kit lens’ I’ve ever owned. It has a lot of positive things written about it around the internet, and for good reason. It's a versatile zoom lens, 18-55mm on a crop sensor should cover the focal lengths that most photographers use, most of the time.

I picked up mine at the same time I bought my XT1 second hand in 2019. I usually prefer prime lenses but I was on a little bit of a budget at the time so opted to go for a zoom lens just to try out the Fuji system as I could try out both wide and normal fields of view and there just happened to be one of these lenses in the second hand cabinet at my local camera store.

The XT1 I bought was advertised with the cheaper, plastic XC 15-45 lens but even with my limited budget at the time I opted to swap it out for the XF18-55 which has a much better build quality and I’d assume better optics as well. Although I've never used the XC 15-45 and it has a good reputation for its price.

The XF 18-55mm has been a kit lens sometimes sold together with Fuji’s higher end APSC cameras like the XT and Xpro lines amongst others. I used this lens as my only lens on the XT1 until about 2022, and on and off until mid 2023 until I sold it as I had picked up a couple of prime lenses to use with the camera by that time. I enjoyed using this lens for the time I had it and the results were excellent for both landscapes and portraits.

I now use adapted Nikon and Minolta lenses plus the Fuji 27mm pancake lens when I travel withe the XT1. The 27mm is now the only native Fuji lens I have for this camera although I would say the optical results are probably better on the 18-55mm. I have no idea if that’s true but just to my eye it seems that way. But I prefer the working with a prime lens, and the 27mm is much smaller and lighter for travel which is the main reason I keep the XT1 so my 18-55 was sold.

I can't fault the end results. For Two years this was my only lens I used on the Fuji system. I used it for landscape, street, and portrait photography.

What alternatives did I have to this lens? I could have gone with the cheaper XC 15-45. I haven’t used this lens at all but it has a good reputation online in terms of value for money and it would have given me the wide and normal fields of view that I like to work with. Or if money was no object I would have bought two lenses, the 23mm and 35mm primes. Since I bought the 18-55mm, I have borrowed and tested out the 16-50 XF lens. This is a much larger, heavier, zoom lens from Fuji and its image quality is well above the 18-55. I didn’t have the budget to even think about this lens when buying my Fuji camera. But even if I did, this lens is too large for me personally, except perhaps to use in a paid shoot. Although if I was working on a paid job I’d most likely want to use a prime lens anyway.

So is the Fuji XF18-55mm lens just a kit lens? Yes it is! But it’s a very good one. Even though I don’t own mine anymore if you want a zoom lens that isn’t too expensive but has great quality then it’s a great lens. I’d recommend it to someone in the situation I was when I bought my first Fujifilm camera. Someone who wants to buy one lens for their camera that can cover wide, normal, and modest telephoto fields of view on their new camera system.