Review by Klaus Schroiff, published April 2014

Introduction

While the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 is a short lens, it is actually quite “fat”. When placing the camera with attached lens on a table, the combo will actually stand on the lens front on one end. Obviously Zeiss decided to implement a rather large front element which simply takes some space. However, bigger tends to be better - we’ll see whether there's some truth in this. The build quality is excellent thanks to a tightly assembled combination of plastic and metal parts based on a metal mount. A big plastic lens hood is supplied. The focus ring is rubberized which is really nice from a handling perspective although it also collects dust like hell. Some users criticized that the dedicated aperture ring doesn’t provide sufficient friction to keep a setting during unmounting/storing/mounting. While this is a valid argument for sure, we don't think that this is a showstopper.

We used a rather old Fujifilm X-E1 for testing which isn’t exactly renowned for AF speed. However, it is certainly fast enough for a lens in this focal length class. The X-E2 or X-T1 should be vastly superior in this respect anyway. The AF accuracy was generally fine and the noise level is very low. Manual focusing works “by wire” so you actually trigger the AF motor by turning the focus ring. This works reasonably well.