Jonathanjk’s Weblog

Okay, I got the lens today thinking it would arrive tomorrow, a day early can’t be bad!

This is one holy hell of a quality lens, as I mounted it onto my camera it cleared any doubts I had of spending £558/$1116 on it, it feels so good its assuring!  What £500 pounds?  I bagged it on eBay only a few days ago, from a very reliable seller, the seller can be found here.  It feels heavy but its actually lighter than the 12-60mm Zuiko lens (same ebay seller) by Olympus.  The technical specs of these lenses can be found in the links I’ve provided, which I’m not going to go into here, I’m simply going to showcase some images for other people’s benefit as there is a lot of talk about this lens for 4/3rds owners. (If I haven’t covered anything of interest to you or you would like something else from this review, send me a comment and I would be happy to make an amendment.

The Panasonic Lumix/Leica lens was something I was after ever since I got hold of the Olympus E420, I always want to keep noise down as much as possible and stay away from high ISO.  I like my fast primes and I’ve owned the Canon EF 50 f1.4mm in the past and the Canon 50mm FD f1.2mm, these are also great lenses to own.  I could have got the Olympus pancake lens but I wanted something faster than f2.8 which for a prime is kinda poor, granted it is a very small lens but it falls down to a personal preference doesn’t it?

For Bokeh there would be no comparison either .

For the moment in this first part, I’m offering a size comparison between these 2 lenses and including a Sekonic light meter to help with scale incase you haven’t seen either lens first hand, I hope this helps?

Pictured below are the two lenses.  Notice how much extra in length the Panasonic/Leica is, simply with the addition of the lens hood!  With the hood down it is a lot shorter but it reminds me of Dark Helmet (also oversized) from Space Balls, the lens itself is quite big but with it attached to my camera it is still compact for an SLR.  Much much smaller and lighter than when I had my 5D with the 50mm lens attached as well.

Part 2 will be uploaded sometime on Sunday as I will actually shoot with it on location on Saturday as well as provide set up shots showing comparisons between f1.4, f2 and f16.

UPDATE:  As you can see I got the Olympus E420 back and added a few more pictures.