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

Here is where the review begins to get interesting, it’s just Panasonic/Leica images here on in! Sunday was a terrible day for weather so I was confined to my house and back garden for most shots. Sorry!

I was interested in the Depth of Field and the Chromatic Aberration if the lens would produce any. Which it did, slightly at higher f-stops in the centre and to the sides at lower f-stops. I took some random images as well for a later part in this review and it does so up slightly in other images, again it disappears at lower f-stops. It must be noted that I can’t see any CA unless I zoom really close in so I’m not concerned so much about it, but your reactions may very.

There was no need for me to create crops of these images as the zoom function illustrates well the details I’m talking about.  I’m trying to not comment too much as I want the images to speak for themselves.

The rest of this review will be uploaded some time tomorrow with a conclusion, I’m having image upload problems at the moment.

Minimum focusing distance

In this part I just wanted to quickly illustrate the minimum focusing distance with each lens using their highest aperture. I used a pencil as a guide, this is where the 2 zoom lenses shine in effect because their focusing distances are shorter than the Leica.  The 12-60mm especially so.

Images with the 1A and 1B are related to the kit lens.  Images with 2A and 2B are concerned with the Leica, images 3A, 3B, 4A and 4B are concerning the Zuiko 12-60mm.

Panasonic Lumix/Leica 25mm Prime

Making Comparisons

What I’ve done is organise a few setup shots with all three lenses to measure the differences between each and with:

• Minimum aperture for each lens
• f16 selected between all 3 lenses
• f22 for making comparisons to f16

What I am going to do then is measure bokeh with minimum apertures and lens sharpness equally at f16 and just out of interest at f22 to see the difference. This excludes the Leica lens as it is limited to f16 but it will be interesting to see what the other lenses can do.
The minimum focusing distance was something I thought was interesting and have taken some pictures to show that between the three lenses. The images will be unprocessed from best quality Raw, using Lightroom 2 for exporting the Raw files to full quality jpegs. I’ve shot at ISO 100 as well. PLEASE NOTE, these are full size quality jpegs!

Focusing with the Leica 25mm Prime
I’ve set up these series of images so each focus point has something of interest at different distances to each other, the Olympus has three focus points. I have a Cactus on the left, Yellow Pages in the distance in the center and my Optimus Prime Transformer on the right as the primary subjects of interest. Everything else in the image will act as a guide to help you make your own judgements, for example behind the Yellow pages is a foldable washing line (to judge image sharpness with lower apertures and to see how much difference Bokeh makes) also on the table is some literature with text reading away from the camera.

You can see right away the bokeh present at f1.4 in the previews!

If you can’t tell where I have focused, I’ve started first on the Cactus Pot, then the Yellow Pages and then Optimus Primes’ left leg, read the images from left to right for all examples given.

Olympus 17.5-45mm

Making comparisons.

What I’ve done is organise a few setup shots with all three lenses to measure the differences between each and with:

• Minimum aperture for each lens
• f16 selected between all 3 lenses
• f22 for making comparisons to f16

Lens and Test information

NOTE: Part two is mainly about the differences in the lenses and how it works for me. Part three has the comparison pictures so skip ahead if you don’t want to read about my decision to buy the lenses I owned. I’m not going to comment on the Olympus E420 itself.

What I’ve done is compare this prime lens with two zoom lenses, it isn’t entirely fair of course and comparisons like these are obviously unbalanced to a degree.  What I’ve done is limit the two zoom lenses to the 25mm focal length in order to keep things balanced.  The two zoom lenses are:

• 17.5-45mm f3.5-f5.6 (35-90mm) Kit lens
• 12-60mm f2.8-f4 (24-120) standard zoom lens

Both lenses have a moving aperture and the f-stop moves in accordance when selecting the focal length. So of course while comparing Bokeh and making comparisons between lenses, the Leica lens will of course produce a greater depth of field because of its higher f-stop!