Verdict

Ultra-wide angle lenses are never really perfect. However, within its scope the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 delivers pretty impressive results. The center quality is great and the border and corner quality are good to very good at mainstream settings. The very low lateral CAs contribute to the high sharpness perception. Distortions and vignetting are usually auto-corrected either by the camera or your favorite RAW converter so you don’t have to worry about these aspects from a normal user perspective. However, when looking at the naked raw files, you can spot a few issues. The raw distortions are actually still quite fine at 2% – this is a normal value for such a prime lens and lower than on most conventional zoom lenses for sure. However, the raw vignetting is very high especially at max. aperture. Overall we liked the build quality – and looks – of the Zeiss lens. The incorporated materials are obviously of high quality. However, the implementation of the aperture ring may not be perfect – while it provides distinctive „clicks“ you tend to change the setting by (un-)mounting because it turns too easily. Just like on the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 we weren’t totally convinced by the AF but it does an Okay job in terms of AF speed and the generated noise level is quite low. As mentioned we still used an old X-E1 for the test so the AF performance is probably a much lesser issue on the X-E2 and X-T1 anyway. A key question is, of course, how the Zeiss lens performs compared to its nearest rival – the Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R. The Fuji lens is slightly sharper in the image corners at medium apertures but then it’s also not quite as wide. These two extra millimeters can make quite a difference. To phrase it differently: the diagonal view angle the Zeiss lens reaches 99 degrees vs 89 degrees for the Fuji lens. Thus if you are after an even more dramatic perspective in your images, the Zeiss may be the more interesting choice…….

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ePhotoZine reviews Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8