New Toys Olympus lenses

As some of you Hivers may know I love my Micro 4/3 cameras. Size is a big advantage. I know all the arguments for Full Frame 35mm sensors but these days the technology for M4/3 sensors is amazing and unless your cropping and zooming in a ridiculous amount or blowing up up photos to wall size poster M4/3 works just fine.

The camera and lens size comes a big advantage when your doing street photography or travelling as my latest two additions prove, Just after Christmas I treated myself to an Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro lens that I had been lusting after for months. Allegedly one of the best M4/3 macro lenses on the market it’s tiny 82mm long and 56mm dia at 185g it’s light too.

And the results are amazing auto focus is really fast and using the focus range limit switch can make it even faster.

And there is an handy window that identifies what’s been selected.

I’ve found it’s an ideal complement to my Olympus EM-1 M4/3 camera.

Here are a couple of examples of Macro photos with Bob the cat.

As I did say 2 additions the other lens is a bit bit bigger beast. The Olympus 75-300mm f4.8-f6.7 is a fair bit bigger than the 60mm macro given that it is a full frame 150-600mm zoom equivalent it’s a lot of lens in a small package.

Even with the lens fully extended it’s not a big package. Oooerr. At only 423grams it’s very light the FF equivalent would be around 1.4Kg and twice as long. The lens has 18 elements in 13 groups and the both the zoom and manual focus ring are butter smooth. And just over 1kg with the camera (still less than just the equivalent FF zoom lens) it’s very easy to handle even for extended periods.

Zoomed in at 75mm

Zoomed out at 300mm

It’s dark and raining out side so here are a couple of indoor shots showing the zoom range.

All for now Hivers.

Hang on just one small gripe with Olympus though is the lenses don’t come with lens hoods which add a bit to the over all price the genuine Olympus ones are about £50 so thank god for eBay. The RRP of the 60mm Macro is £499 and the 75-300mm zoom is £549 so they are not that cheap but the quality of Olympus Zuiko digital lenses is amazing even for the premium no Pro versions.