Olympus m.ZD 75mm f/1.8 lens
see also:
Sharp wide open with great flare control, shallow depth of field (DOF) and deliciously smooth bokeh - an almost perfect lens:
introduction
-
it is be optimised for video as well as still and thus have fast, near silent AF with Olympus' MSC designation.
the combination of 75mm and f/1.8 allows nice shallow depth of field imagery with lovely bokeh and this lens is incredibly sharp wide open!
combine this lens with the
Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera and you get 5 axis 5EV image stabilisation and f/1.8 aperture with a more usable DOF of a f/3.6 lens - an awesome combination indeed!
-
my favorite lens for 3/4 body-length outdoor portrait shots where the background is nicely blurred is the Canon 135mm f/2.0 lens on a Canon 1D Mark III 1.3x crop camera shot at f/2.5-2.8 to give just enough
depth of field (DOF).
this equates to 176mm f/3.3-3.6 on a full frame camera or 88mm f/1.8 on a Micro Four Thirds camera, so the 75mm f/1.8 comes very close to my ideal lens for this type of shooting, plus you get the added advantage of image stabilisation on Olympus cameras and the wider f/stop, for lower light conditions when shooting in the shade or at flash sync when using flash fill-in, which can be very handy.
the 75mm shot wide open at f/1.8 on my E-M5 is even SHARPER than the excellent pro 135mm f/2.0L lens when shot at f/2.8 on my Canon 1D Mark III and much sharper than it when shot at f/2.0 at 1/400th sec!!
Now if only Olympus made an adapter to allow their ring flash to be attached as a fill-in flash - in the interim, I would have to resort to a Canon Ring Flash with a 58mm filter thread adapter and manual flash exposure, but with a hotshoe adapter without the extra TTL pins, I could push the
Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera to fast flash sync speeds of 1/500th sec with some flash cutoff, but still very handy in sunlit situations.
the lens will give similar imagery in terms of field of view and depth of field as a 150mm f/3.6 lens on a full frame camera - not far off the professional's full frame workhorse lens specs of a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens when used at 150mm.
thus it will give similar FOV and and only half a stop more DOF to:
the well corrected astigmatism, vignetting, distortion and its sharpness wide open, could mean this lens could be a fantastic lens for astrophotography, similar to how the Canon 200mm f/2.8L lens has been to Canon users although the field of view will be substantially wider.
specs
75mm f/1.8 = 150mm in 35mm terms
close focus 0.84m = 0.1x macro with image coverage of 173x130mm
“ZERO” nano coating
58mm filter thread (non-rotating)
high speed, silent focusing with MSC lens drive technology
precision manual focus ring but no focus distance scale
internal focus
10 elements in 9 groups
3 ED and 2 HR lens elements
9 rounded blades
lovely smooth bokeh
apparently, correction of astigmatism is almost perfect, contrast and resolution across the frame is excellent
63.5mm diam x 69.5mm long
305g (10.8oz)
$US899, $A999
optional LH-61F metal lens hood - attaches with an outer friction knob system that allows attachment or removal even when the lens cap is attached
optional LC-61 metal lens cap
image quality would appear to be significantly better than the very sharp Olympus m.ZD 45mm f/1.8 portrait lens and almost as good as the superb Olympus ZD 150mm f/2.0 super telephoto lens
reviews
-
-
-
“one of the finest short tele lenses I have ever used”
“a little purple fringing at f/1.8 and f/2.0, and slight ghosting and loss of contrast wide open”
“Practically no vignetting and no distortion can be seen”
edge-to-edge sharpness best at f/2.8 to f/8 but still great wide open
-
-
-
-
-
very sharp wide open, outstandingly sharp at f/4.0
very low CA - “brilliant!”
traces of spherical aberration and very minor pincushion
only slight coma wide open in the corners but largely disappears by f/2.5
some astigmatism as MTF50 values varied by 9% from vertical to horizontal on average
nice defocused light points but with some vignetting evidenced in corners at f/1.8-2.5 but disappears by f/3.5
some vignetting (0.98EV wide open) but disappears by f/2.8
“if all lenses were so good, I would become unemployed pretty quickly. Still I am truly glad that, from time to time, I encounter a lens that can be assessed only positively in a review full of superlatives. The Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 75 mm f/1.8 ED is undoubtedly such a lens.”
-
-
-
resolution is outstanding straight from max. aperture down to f/4 and that's across the image frame
minimal lateral CA
bokeh is very smooth and buttery and that's both in the foreground and background which is a rare characteristic, although the out of focus highlights wide open in the periphery do become ellipsoid due to the mild vignetting
some longitudinal CA at f/1.8-2.8
it is, by quite a margin, the best micro-four-thirds lens that we have tested to date
-
-
-
example photos