Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III + Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 (1/200 sec, f/1.8, ISO200) (Image credit: James Artaius) One thing I missed with my Leica lens however was a working focus ring. Even though it has got one, the full functionality of the ring is not supported by Olympus bodies. I enjoyed this feature on my old Sigma lenses so much so that it got me searching for a new lens. Finally the Pansonic 45mm enjoys optical stabilization, whereas the Olympus 45mm has none built-in. This may be a moot point though depending on which body you own. All Olympus PEN and OM-D bodies sport built-in stabilization which works with any lens, so mount the 45mm f1.8 on an Olympus body and it’ll become stabilized; having stabilization built-into the Olympus bodies also makes the optical stabilization on the Panasonic lens redundant. But if you mount the Olympus 45mm f1.8 on a Panasonic Lumix G body they’ll become an unstabilised combination which could be an issue depending on your usage.

Olympus PEN E-PL7 + Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 (1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO200) (Image credit: James Artaius) Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8: Verdict Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. Starting with the crops from the middle of the frame, I’d say both lenses are roughly similar in sharpness, although the Lumix 42.5mm starts with a little higher contrast. By f4 though, they’re fairly evenly matched in performance.

Levels of distortion are also very low, as you might expect for a prime lens like this. Imatest managed to detect 0.215% barrel distortion, which will be very difficult to spot by eye, even with straight lines close to the edges of the frame. As my travels took me to various places in Southeast Asia, I mostly used my camera to capture life on the streets and outdoors. It never ceases to amaze me how people from different cultures live and work for a large part out in the open, going about with their lives in front of the most fascinating sceneries. Seeing this taught me that if you just open your eyes to the world, you have to be blind to miss its beauty. Using a camera really adds to the experience of immersing yourself deeply into the moment. While focusing for stills and video, the lens mechanisms of both lenses are so quiet that you have to hold your ear up to the lens to hear the faint whirring of the motor. Finally, I haven't stated that we believe the manufacturers have responded to our requests (I'm sure if we're requesting it, plenty of other people are too, and I'd hope any company would pay more attention to their broader market research than just making what we recommended). There's a pleasing manual focus ring that's the perfect width and has just the right amount of knurling, though this employs a focus-by-wire system that old school purists who prefer mechanical focusing may not be a fan of.

Note: the 42.5mm f/1.7 sample was a pre-production model but fully functional. It was available for people to try at the National Trust event held by Panasonic. Design and ease of usedon’t shoot portraits on a regular basis but want something better than the kit lens that comes with your camera The Olympus 45mm f1.8 M.ZUIKO Digital Lens is a short-telephoto prime designed for Micro Four Thirds compact system cameras. With its equivalent range of 90mm on a 35mm film camera and large f/1.8 aperture, the lens is ideal for a variety of applications, including portraiture, interior work, low-light shooting, and everyday snapshots.

Flare is rarely an issue with this lens, except in exceptional circumstances. Shooting directly into bright sources of light will result in a loss of contrast, but no more so than similar lenses. An optional lens hood can be acquired and although this optic isn't overly prone to flare, it would've been nice for the hood to come included. The Panasonic 42.5mm f/1.7 is yet another nice addition to the Micro Four Thirds system, even if it wasn’t a focal length that was missing in the lens line-up. The differences between it and the M.Zuiko 45mm are more related to the build quality and optical stabilisation than the optical quality. The lens does provides poor macro ability at best - at its close focusing distance of 50cm (around 20 inches) it provides only 0.11x magnification.

Olympus M. Zuiko Digital 45mm f/1.8 Sample Photos

Portraiture is a popular genre regardless of the camera system in question and 85mm/90mm lenses (35mm format) have always given photographers the perfect field of view with which to work. As of late 2017, there are a number of Micro Four Thirds lenses that fall into this category but today we are comparing the oldest offering with the newest addition to the system. It's an absolutely fantastic portrait lens that's also adept at day-to-day photography if you know how to use it. So while this is mainly one for the headshot hunters, it's more versatile than it seems –and if you want to try your hand at portraiture, it's such low price and great value that you can't really go wrong.

Of course I couldn’t resist taking an additional set of comparison shots with the Nocticron 42.5mm f/1.2, currently the best portrait lens for Micro Four Thirds in terms of image quality. But the Nocticron is larger, heavier and more expensive (3 times the price of its little brother). The Leica designed lens also has a stronger build, comes with a metal lens hood and has a nice aperture ring that works on Panasonic bodies only. As noted earlier the wide, ridged focus ring is not mechanically coupled but works very much as if it was - except that it has no stops, hard or soft, at either end of the focus range, making it difficult to judge whether you've reached the close-focus point or the infinity setting. Otherwise it feels like a "proper" focus ring, with smooth action and no perceptible delays. So we were understandably delighted when Olympus announced a lens that fitted this definition almost perfectly. And still more encouraged when we discovered they were asking a fairly sensible amount of money for it. It doesn't have the 12mm F2's beautiful all-metal build and clever manual focus engineering but we'd much prefer a price tag that will see it end up in more people's kit bags. What about the faithful 50s? The EM1 was set to its base sensitivity of 200 ISO and the lens focused on the center of the composition using magnified Live View assistance. The corner and center crops shown below were taken from the areas marked with the red squares, right, and presented at 100%. Olympus ในระบบ m4/3 นั่นก็คือเลนส์ Olympus m.zuiko 45 f1.8 ครับ โดยเมื่อคูณแล้วจะเท่ากับระยะ 90 บนฟลูเฟลม เป็นเลนส์ระยะ portrait ราคาประหยัด ไปชมกันเลยดีกว่าครับThe M.Zuiko Digital 45mm f/1,8 may have a lot of plastic parts but the lens mount is, thankfully, made of metal. Olympus does not claim any sort of weather resistance for this lens, and indeed you cannot see a rubber seal around the mount (note that no current Micro Four Thirds camera is weather sealed anyway) I found some traces of chromatic aberration at the fastest apertures in images with strong contrast like the picture below. It is present in both the JPG and Raw versions. However it is easily removable in Lightroom. DMC-G7, 1/4000, f/ 1.7, ISO 200 Getting a perfect and crisp image this way can be challenging at times, but apart from the advantages of speed, the mere fun of waiting in a good hide-out or walking the streets with an “armed” camera is amazing. For me, this technique feels almost experimental, a bit like in Lomography.