Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150 mm F2.8 PRO Lens, Telephoto Zoom, Suitable for All MFT Cameras (Olympus OM-D & PEN Models, Panasonic G Series), Black

Product Information

Staying with optics, another important difference between the lenses is the presence of optical stabilisation on the Leica, which in my tests delivered up to six stops of compensation at 200mm. In contrast, the Olympus lens is unstabilised, instead relying on body-based stabilisation in your camera. If you have an unstabilised body, then the Leica is much more attractive thanks to its optical compensation. Following an initial day of testing at the Cheltenham horse races with Ken McMahon, Gordon sourced a second sample of the lens and tested it for a month in a wide variety of portrait, landscape and action environments. He also retested the lens with the Olympus ODM EM1 updated to firmware 2.2 which claims to deliver superior AF precision with the 40-150mm. Read on to find out if this is the telephoto zoom Micro Four Thirds owners have been waiting for. Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 Pro design and build quality Vignetting is very much NOT an issue with the Olympus 40-150mm ƒ/2.8 lens. At ƒ/2.8, there's a hint of vignetting at all focal lengths -- hovering around 0.25EVs of corner shading. When the lens is stopped down to ƒ/4 and beyond, the vignetting drops to around zero. It’s the speed of the autofocus, as well as the image quality performance of course, that Olympus users will be most eager to read about. Perhaps the only downside with this lens is the appearance of some chromatic aberration. It's mostly visible as light purple and green fringing at the shorter focal lengths and most seen in the corners both wide open and stopped down to ƒ/8. By the time you zoom into 70mm, however, the visible corner CA is greatly reduced and continues to be very minimal to virtually invisible at longer focal lengths and at all apertures.

If you only ever need 150mm, the 40-150/f2.8 will probably give you better results. It has a faster aperture, which gives you more flexibility, and when stopped down to f/4 is sharper at 150mm than the Panasonic-Leica is (79 lp/mm vs. ~61 lp/mm) as it's closer to wide open. With the lens attached to an Olympus E-M5 camera body, focusing is incredibly fast. The subject typically pops into focus within the blink of an eye – very impressive. In good light you will even find the C-AF performance respectable, if not quite on a par with a pro SLR. A word of warning though – if you have face detection AF enabled on the E-M5 and you are not focusing on a human subject, the auto focus system becomes slower, less decisive and sometimes downright confused. So make sure to switch face detection off whenever photographing something other than a person. This may only apply to selected camera models though – it is entirely plausible that this problem won't arise when shooting with an OM-D E-M1, for instance. 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).You want a sharp zoom lens? You got it. The Olympus 40-150mm lens is not only stunningly sharp by zoom lens standards, but also sharp by prime lens standards. And this is wide open at ƒ/2.8 at practically every other focal length. So while the 40-150 lens is very sharp wide open at all focal lengths, our graphs indicate an extremely subtle drop in sharpness at 150mm ƒ/2.8. It's so minimal, though, that it will most likely not impact real-world shooting at all. Corner-to-corner sharpness is also tremendously good, with almost no change in sharpness from center softness at every focal length. The blur characteristics are very flat. For all intents and purposes, this lens is sharp, everywhere, all the time from ƒ/2.8 to around ƒ/11-ƒ/16, where we see minor diffraction softness coming into play. As for the “equivalency” goofiness regarding aperture, it is indeed a goofy stretch whereby “Fool Frame Fanatics” manage to convince people that you have to double the ƒ ratio of µ4/3rds lenses. Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as purple or blue fringes along contrasty edges, are essentially a non-issue with this lens. We were hard pressed to find any evidence of CA in the images – these are the absolute worst examples we were able to dig up.

The M.Zuiko 40-150mm f2.8 Pro is environmentally sealed with 11 separate seals to keep out dust and moisture making it splash-proof and dust-proof as well as freeze-proof. I used the 40-150mm on the Olympus OMD EM1 – a weather-sealed combination – during steady drizzle without complaint from either. While it’s small and comparatively light the M.Zuiko 40-150mm f2.8 Pro nonetheless feels like a solid piece of optical engineering. The zoom and focus rings have a textured finish that provides a secure comfortable grip and the motion of the zoom ring is super-smooth with enough resistance to maintain the set focal length without creeping if the lens is pointed up or down. Anyway, welcome to µ4/3rds, and please don’t apologize for the “slights” that the full-frame crowd mistakenly throw at our preferred format! Explain them, don’t apologize for them!The Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro is an optically excellent, high-performance, metal-cased beast of a lens and perhaps the best telephoto zoom I’ve ever used. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA But the real game changer comes when you screw on the tiny Olympus 1.4x teleconverter – thus converting the Olympus into a 56-210mm F4 lens or 112-420mm F8 lens in full-frame terms. To have so much reach in such a high-performance compact lens is very unusual and damn enjoyable. What I don’t like about the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro

The 40-150mm f2.8 Pro is the first Olympus lens to feature dual VCM auto focus. The idea is that AF performance can be improved by separating the focusing mechanism into two lens groups controlled by individual linear drive voice coil motors. This and the absence of gears, claims Olympus, makes the focussing performance lightning fast and very smooth. Traditionally, F4 telephoto, such as the Olympus 40-150mm F4 Pro, present a lightweight alternative to the top-end F2.8 lenses favored by sports photographers. In other words, you get the same premium optics and build quality in a lens that weighs half as much.It’s fair to say this has been a highly anticipated lens, seamlessly continuing where the 12-40mm stops, and delivering an 80-300mm equivalent range that’s desired by close-range action as well as street and portrait shooters. Now with two lenses, Olympus can take you from an equivalent of 24mm all the way to 300mm with a constant f2.8 focal ratio throughout, and while the 40-150mm is obviously one of the larger lenses in the catalogue, it remains compact for a lens for its class. As well as superior optics and performance, the Pro tag denotes high quality construction with an all metal body that is dust, splash and freeze-proof. The lens also comes with a removable lens collar for tripod mounting, as well as a collapsible lens hood. So, for me the 12-100 is easily much more used than the 12-40. As I said, I mostly use the 12-40/2.8 indoors, but often I even then prefer some faster primes, like the panasonic Leica 15/1.7 or Oly 45/1.8. If I want more subject isolation than any of the zooms can offer my preferred choice is the Oly 75/1.8. If I have any complaints about this lens, it is the somewhat busy bokeh that can appear in certain images when the lighting and distances conspire in just the right way. I have also found that the retractable lens hood, while very convenient, should be treated with some respect. The hood mechanism definitely doesnt like the kind of fine grit that can accumulate in some sandy and windy locales. That said, the lens seems very comfortable in wet or cold conditions.