Re: the pancake and other lenses, there is a fun little interactive toy here: There IS no other kind, for sure! (Still waiting for my camera which was put on the local UPS truck this morning) with an irrationally exuberant amount of mayonnaise! (Has anyone really ever read all of his poems?) I don't know about that, but I can assure you that Robert Graves is a little distorted. Smiling route edited this topic ages ago.įederico - are you saying there's visual confirmation that GATT Law and Practice is distorted? :) PPS: an E3 with a 25mm pancake lens, now that’s worth a look :) PS: “the practical zone system” looks like a good book My initial impression is that it stacks up well against top of the class 2007 but wouldn’t win in a sharpness war! Other review sites often have small focus differences in their still life example images.Īndreas Helke edited this topic ages ago. You can´t rely on autofocus to get perfect focus.ĭ is the only review site that consistently gets the focus right. You can only judge lens sharpness if you know that both photos are perfectly focused. The description of the focusing method is missing in the test description. It seems to me that the pancake is sharper wide open? Originally posted at 7:13AM, 25 June 2008 PDTįederico Alberto edited this topic ages ago.
At the resolution of the posted files, each reader should be able to decide if he or she needs to download the files to crop the corners or the center for more detailed examination on their own.
The pictures capture a set of objects that could provide visual evidence on the sharpness at the center and at the borders, while at the same time allowing for verification of the existence (or not) of barrel distortion. They were exported later as JPG files, restricting their size to 1080 x 810. Before posting in flickr, they were all developed with Lightroom 1.4.1 (Mac OS X) without changing any of the original parameters. Unlike my usual preference for natural lightning, I used a flash with a diffuser in order to ensure that at the same apertures each lens would enjoy the same soft lightning.īoth lenses were kept at a 60cm distance from the focus point chosen. Metering: Matrix, with a single focus point fixed on the brightest element of the scene. The standard conditions for this test were as follows: Beyond this maximum f-stop, experts like Wrotniak caution against the emergence of diffraction. Thus, having a reference for a visual comparison, I went on to take six pictures with each lens, at each of the most commonly used apertures: 2.8, 3.5, 4.5, 5.6, 8 and 11.
The comparison is thus made with the Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 EX DC Macro, a superb piece of glass widely praised in the photographic press which deservedly won the 2007 lens of the year award granted last December by Popular Photography. No other Zuiko Digital lens in my arsenal achieves the same aperture at this focal length.
The purpose of this exercise is to post a series of pictures that would allow for a visual evaluation of the sharpness of the new Zuiko Digital 25mm f/2.8 “Pancake”. Good judgment should thus guide the decision on the relevance of the observed distortions. The usefulness of this tiny new lens appears to be limited to those situations in which its optical deficiencies would not be relevant for the task at hand. Summary There appears to be a visual confirmation of barrel distortion at the widest apertures of the new Zuiko Digital 25mm f/2.8 "Pancake".