J O N A T H A N JK . C O M

First impressions and quick comparisons

First off you can get a sense of the quality, simply by holding it. It’s heavy but not too tiring to handle; it’s actually lighter than the 12-60mm Zuiko lens, the construction is solid. My doubts with spending £558/$1116 were cleared as I fastened it to my camera. I bagged this lens on eBay from a very reliable seller, the seller can be found here. 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 show test images for other peoples benefit as there is a lot of talk about.

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 by staying away from high ISO. I love my fast primes; 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, that for a prime is kinda poor, granted it is a very small lens.

For Bokeh there would be no comparison either :).

In this first part, I’m offering a size comparison between these two 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 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. It’s much smaller and lighter compared to my 5D with the 50mm lens attached as well.