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Audii-Dudii wrote:
Thinking the same thing as you, I originally bought mine to use with a Contax 645 / P30+ outfit because the 35/f3.5 C645 lens, while a great performer, wasn't quite wide enough for the urban and suburban street-and-alley scenes I like to photograph. Plus, I had hoped its image circle would be large enough and high-quality enough that I would have at least a few millimeters of rise / fall movement possible.
My plan was to remove the shift mechanism and mount it on my C645 body, but it turns out its FFD was such that with my limited resources, I wouldn't be able to make it focus properly at infinity. Obviously, this isn't an issue with the Fuji G-series cameras and their 26.7 mm FFD (v. 64 mm for the C645) and suitable adapters now available off the shelf.
Anyway, I still own mine and it's apparently one of the better performing copies -- reputation has it that the IQ of this lens varies from copy to copy -- but when used with my A7R, it renders quite a bit differently than the Zeiss lenses I prefer.
In many ways, it's reminiscent of the Leica lenses of its day (which is probably why Leica sold a version of it for its R-series bodies!) with a softer, lower contrast rendering style. Although it's not been my primary lens at this focal length, I do still use it occasionally when this is the look I'm after or I need to use movements but don't want to carry one of my FrankenKameras (which turn every lens into a shift lens) with me.
As you correctly suspect, the image quality does drop off as the lens is shifted off-center, but at least on mine, it does so in a gradual, almost linear way. But as I photograph mostly at night, this is rarely an issue for me since most of my compositions include either a black sky or inky black shadows around the edges, so this is not very visible, if at all.
Although mine is now for sale -- contact me for a good price! -- I doubt you will be pleased by its performance if you're hoping for a rendering style similar to what Fuji's native lenses offer. <shrug>...Show more →
Thanks for the detailed answer! The reason I'm interested in the lens is because of the 28 mm focal length; the Fuji 23 is too wide and the 32-64 not wide enough.  Also, I don't like the huge size of those lenses, even if I'm very close to buying them second hand anyway (the only obstacle is the distance to the seller).
Now, there's a Super-Angulon 28 for sale close to me for 8k SEK, which is roughly equivalent to $800. That's lower than most of these on Ebay, but still a bunch of money if it doesn't perform very well. My main concern is that Schneider themselves says the lens should be stopped down to f/11 for full shift, which is outside the 55 mm image circle that the GFX sensor requires. But I'd like it to be decent over the entire 33x44 area from f/4-5.6 at least.
Some say CA is the worst problem with this lens, and that can be corrected fairly easily as long as the lens is not shifted. Once you shift it, the software won't have any idea of where the middle of the "true" frame is, and I suppose correction will be impossible.
The same seller also has a Pentax 28/3.5 shift lens for the same price. I have not idea of if that's better or not. 
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