We’ve been shooting with all the Olympus 17mm F1.8 lens for a when today plus have put together a test gallery showing the kinds of aspects it may do. We’ve equally prepared several notes found on the experience of shooting with all the 34mm equal quick prime for Micro Four Thirds plus included certain shots which match ones you included inside the Sony RX1 gallery. Beyond which we’ve tried to show a the lens at a series of apertures to show how the lens behaves.

First Impressions

The 34-40mm equal focal size range is absolutely very perfectly served for the Micro Four Thirds program – with consumers being capable to select between Panasonic’s Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH, the Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm F2.8 plus Sigma 19mm F2.8 EX DN, depending about how much they like to invest. Each has its blessings plus disadvantages, however it’s not instantly apparent which there’s a need for another lens inside the same territory.

However, the initially impression of the Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm F1.8 is the fact that it over justifies its existence. Spend any size of time with all the 17mm F1.8 plus it’s difficult to not conclude it adds a helpful additional way plus does a lot to justify its more expense over the existing models (its list cost is $ 70 over the great Panasonic 20mm, though it’s unique enough it currently commands more of the premium than this inside many shops).

Build-wise the 17mm shares the high-end metallic construction of Olympus’ 12mm F2.0 plus 75mm F1.8 lenses, providing a reassuring sense of standard plus toughness (though they’ve not been inside the wild extended enough to recognize when which perception is correct).

Manual focus behavior

The 17mm furthermore involves the pull-back guide focus ring plus distance scale you initially saw found on the 12mm. This retains its position because among the right focus-by-wire manual focus implementations we’ve experienced – the somewhat heavier damping as well as the strong end-stops to the focus travel perform a fantastic job of offering the feel plus functionality of the mechanically-coupled manual focus lens. Sadly this isn’t usually brilliantly handled by Micro Four Thirds camera bodies.

On both Olympus plus Panasonic bodies you must manually activate magnified focus each time you need to check focus, whether or not you’ve absolutely switched the body to manual focus mode plus involved manual focus support / LV close-up mode. The manual focus is stepped nevertheless those procedures are pretty fine, thus you need to be truly paying attention to spot it.

With the focus ring inside the forward position, the 17mm behaves like any alternative Micro Four Thirds lens – flipping the camera body to manual focus delivers the normal speed-sensitive manual concentrating behavior inside that you may continue to turn the focus ring without ever hitting end-stops. It might furthermore activate magnified focus mode when you’ve involved it inside the selections.

However, the 17mm’s focus is driven with a linear engine that, combined with a tiny, light internal focus device signifies it autofocuses because quick because the camera will instruct it. Focus is virtually instant about both Olympus plus Panasonic camera bodies. This provides a well-defined benefit over the Panasonic 20mm, whose geared engine plus device focus shape doesn’t provide the snappiness of the newest lenses selected found on the newest bodies. The 17mm is moreover very quiet whenever concentrating, generating it more appropriate for movie function.

We haven’t had to chance to test the image standard inside detail nevertheless, without because sensationally sharp because the 45mm F1.8 plus 75mm F1.8 lenses, the 17mm appears to do very perfectly plus with neither corner sharpness neither distortion showing much to be worried regarding.

Like many quick primes the 17mm F1.8 shows very apparent longitudinal chromatic aberration at big apertures, many noticeable because green fringing about bright regions behind the airplane of focus. As routine this reduces slowly about stopping down, plus disappears completely by F4. There’s a small lateral chromatic aberration, noticeable because red/cyan fringing towards the edges of the frame, nevertheless this might be simple to eliminate inside raw processing when essential. But Olympus doesn’t include correction info inside the lens, thus it’s not automatically corrected.

Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm F1.8 Samples Gallery

There are 26 pictures inside the samples gallery. Please never reproduce any of these pictures about a webpage or any newsletter / magazine without before permission (see the copyright page). We result in the originals accessible for private consumers to download to their own machines for individual examination or printing (inside combination with this review), you do thus inside superior belief, please don’t misuse it.