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Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-40 mm F2.8 PRO Lens, Universal Zoom, Suitable for All MFT Cameras (Olympus OM-D & PEN Models, Panasonic G-Series), Black

£9.9£99Clearance
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A petal-shaped hood is supplied with this lens, which does a reasonable job of shading the lens from extraneous light that may cause issues with loss of contrast or flare. Even without the hood in place, this lens is very resistant to flare and contrast levels hold up well when shooting into the light. It’s tiny but mighty. If you were ever a fan of the dwarves in Warhammer, Gimli in Lord of the Rings, or the astonishing efficiency of dishwater cleaning tablets, you’ll like this. Small can be awesome for sure. Autofocus

However having owned all 3 lenses and as an owner of the Panasonic GH5 and Olympus EM5 II I decided that the build quality of the Olympus 12-40mm edged out the Panasonic and so I kept it over its rivals. When I say edged out, it is night and day. The Panasonic’s feel like a consumer grade lens with very good optics. The Olympus 12-40mm feels like a professional grade lens in every way. The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column. This is a pro-grade optic that's one of the "holy trinity" lenses, offering a fast, fixed f/2.8 aperture and full weather sealing. (Indeed, as noted, it offers the best weather sealing in the business.)Sell the kit you’re not using to MPB. Trade in for the kit you need to create. Buy used, spend less and get more. Buy. Sell. Trade. Create. I can recommend the LEICA 12-60mm / F2.8-4.0 ASPH, it doesn't say Panasonic on it, says LEICA DG VARIO-ELMARIT on the barrel and around the front element, and doesn't feel like other Panasonic zooms. It's tightly engineered, all metal construction, even the zoom/focus rings are finely machined metal (not rubber grips). Chromatic aberrations are well controlled throughout most of the zoom range. Between 12mm and 18mm fringing only exceeds half a pixel width when stopped down to between f/11 and f/22. At 40mm fringing just exceeds three quarters of a pixel width towards the edges of the frame at f/2.8, but even so, this low level should be difficult to spot. I do know enough about macro to know that these are terrible. I tried auto and manual focus. I have focus magnify turned on and focus peaking. I found the focus magnify to be not very helpful when taking these shots.

The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple. TheOM System 12-40mm f2.8 Pro II we tested was a loaner unit provided to us by OM System. It was used with the:The Panny 35-100 F2.8 ii would, for many, get you the range 12-100 F2.8 in a smaller combo, but, since you only want to buy Oly lenses, the two Oly Pro zooms would be my recommendation. The concerns of a M43 user about equivalence are mainly focal length so they know what FoV they're getting. Maybe a little DoF concern so they can get some subject separation.

Falloff of illumination towards the corners is fairly typical for a standard zoom lens, and shouldn't pose too many issues. At 12mm and f/2.8 the comers are 1.35 stops darker than the centre of the image and at 40mm, and falloff is reduced and the corners are only 0.76 stops darker than the image centre. Stopping down to f/5.6 results in visually uniform illumination across the frame throughout the zoom range. The best choice, if affordable and size is not a problem, is to buy the Oly 12-40 and the Oly 40-150. This gives you superb IQ and F2.8 from 12-150. This is regardless of whether or not the scene detection is on. So with all this said, you’ll have to give the OM System 12-40mm f2.8 Pro II a bit of focusing assistance by choosing an area for it to focus on. This is in some ways an antiquated way of thinking for a lens like this. If it were a much longer focal length and photographing birds, it would be different. But there were surely times where the OM System 12-40mm f2.8 Pro II frustrated me over a period of a few months of testing. If you are shooting on a Panasonic body then perhaps you might prefer to go with the Panasonic lens to take advantage of Panasonic’s depth from defocus system and in the case of the mark ii lens their dual sync IS. The Panasonic lenses are both lighter than the Olympus.

Olympus M.Zuiko ED 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO Specifications

Meike 6.5mm f2 Fisheye: an interesting combination of fast aperture and very wide fisheye lens, but we haven’t tested it. There is also an 8mm f3.5 but it is designed for DSLRs, and is therefore larger. The Lumix too has a ribbed manual focus and zoom ring but the latter is covered in rubber. Though it attracts more dust, I actually prefer rubber rings as they are more comfortable to use on cold days. It doesn’t have a clutch mechanism nor a function button but it does benefit from a Power O.I.S. (optical image stabilisation) switch, a feature I’ll discuss in more detail later on. The Power O.I.S. switch on the Lumix 12-35mm There are two rings on this lens, the zoom ring and the focus ring. The zoom ring is located closer to the camera body and is about one inch long and has metal ribbing for an easy grip. It rotates smoothly, but has a nice resistance, which is stiff enough that it won't creep, but it definitely takes two fingers to rotate. This lens, while an internally focusing lens, is not an internally zooming lens, and will extend while zooming. It actually extends ever so slightly from 12mm until about 18mm, then from 18mm onwards, it extends more significantly, about an extra inch or so. This lens isn’t specifically built for macro, with a maximum magnification ratio of 0.3x / 1:3.3 (0.6x / 1:1.7 in 35mm eq.) and a minimum close-focusing distance of around 20cm (7.87 in.). Still, the Olympus 12-40mm ƒ/2.8 Zuiko PRO provides a respectable performance in the macro category. Your mistake is forgetting the micro 4/3s sensor is 1/4 of the size, so it doesn't need the same amount of photons to properly expose it. It only needs 1/4 of the photons to expose 1/4 as many photoreceptors.

Once you've decided what the shot is, then you'll be able to see how to place the focus, and possibly how to position the shot so the bit you want sharp is all in the same plane.

Build Quality

And finally we come to the Micro Four Thirds to Full Frame SENSOR comparison and the insistence that discussing equivalence means that the M43 shooter is trying to get the same ISO noise performance.

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