The Pansonic Lumix G 25mm F1.7 ASPH is an affordable and capable option for Four-Thirds shooters seeking something more versatile than the kit lens, especially for low-light photography. It's well-built, compact, and fast/quiet to focus, making it a good choice for stills and video shooters alike. Another thought if you can tolerate a 'slower' lens (but perhaps faster than your current lens) is you might be able to get a used Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 pro lens for that amount of money. That is two stops slower than a f/1.4 lens, but if you are willing to process noise, I find often the 12-40mm is great at indoor photos without a flash. However, rumours of the death of Micro Four Thirds are greatly exaggerated. The reinvention of Olympus as OM-System has breathed new life into the format, resulting in a raft of weather-proof cameras and lenses. Panasonic, meanwhile, still has a hugely popular video range in the form of its Lumix GH cameras, including the Panasonic Lumix GH6. More recently, the release of the Lumix G9 II has confirmed that Panasonic is committed to the MFT system in the long-term. With a metal build and well-engineered handling, this is a pleasant lens to use. Time marches on, and with the OM System version out there for a cheaper asking price, there may not be much call for this zoom – but it’s an excellent optic in its own right. Pros There are certainly some who think the format’s day in the sun is coming to an end. Earlier this year, Sigma announced it would no longer be developing Micro Four Thirds lenses, stating that its future priority would be full-frame lenses.

Panasonic’s 20mm f1.7 II is an autofocusing beast on the GH4 when using the fully automatic focusing modes and not choosing a point beforehand. In fact, we think that it is the fastest focusing lens that we’ve seen for street photography. But when you mount it on the OMD EM5, it starts to lag a bit behind. Once you start selecting specific focusing areas, the focusing speed goes from sloth-like to peregrine falcon. Image Quality Handling | Compared to | Autofocus and focus breathing | Image quality | Conclusion | Samples | Full specifications The only other prime designed specifically for micro-four thirds at the time of writing, the Olympus 17mm is a slower lens (ƒ/2.8 instead of ƒ/1.7) but offers a slightly wider field of view. The lens is slightly smaller than the Panasonic 20mm and the Panasonic easily bests it in terms of sharpness, resistance to chromatic aberration, and distortion. To its favor, the Olympus shows less corner shading than the Panasonic. This Panasonic 25mm F1.7 is fairly sharp across the focal plane, wide open. And even on the highest resolution 20MP Four Thirds sensors, its resolving power should leave most users satisfied.

This is something of a niche lens – do many shooters need a weather-sealed fisheye? Not many.But if this is your niche, you’re in for a treat. Pros Of course, for a little more money, you can get Sigma's slightly faster 30mm F1.4 DC DN lens, which is also a strong optical performer. But the trade-off is a tighter crop (60mm in Full-frame terms) and a lens construction that's quite a bit longer and about twice as heavy as the Panasonic. This entry in the feather-weight category of Micro Four Thirds lenses has been around a good while, but we re-tested it recently to see how it holds up and found ourselves summarily impressed. The Panasonic Lumix G 20mm f1.7 II, which somehow weighs about the same as a couple of boxes of matches, is a crisp, fast and punchy lens that makes for an excellent day-to-day shooter. Its equivalent focal length of 40mm makes it a natural choice for general, all-purpose photography, providing a similarly naturalistic perspective to a nifty-fifty but getting that little bit more of the scene in the frame. This wide-angle prime, a recent effort from Panasonic, is a solid addition to the kit bag of any landscape photographer using Micro Four Thirds. It impressed across the board in our testing, delivering sharp results in most shooting scenarios that we subjected it to. It’s also worth noting that this is an autofocus lens, which somewhat sets it apart in the MFT system – generally, for something this wide (18mm equivalent), your options are manual focus only.

However, I bought a used Panasonic 100-300mm mark II lens, and I mounted it on my Panasonic G85. This is Panasonic to Panasonic, so gasket size should not matter. I took it out on a whale watch in the north Atlantic on a large commercial boat. Normally we don't get large splashes, but this time we did. When I got to the car and I used the distilled water I bring with me to clean the gear ASAP, the Olympus E-m1 mark I worked fine. The Olympus 14-150mm mark II that I had on the E-m1 mark I worked fine. The Panasonic G85 worked fine. The Panasonic 100-300mm mark II would not turn on. I would also expect this might explain the different sharpness results from the 16mp tests(and my own experience) and the 12mp tests, where the added contrast helps lenses resolve more detail at the edges, whereas on a more resolving sensor you might see there is actually more resolution with the 20mm. Even when shooting with the included lens hood attached, artifacts from lens flare can be pretty distracting with this lens. You may notice ghosting when shooting directly into the sun, usually manifesting as a multiple-color haze or purple blobs. If you really want sharper image quality, use a flash. Your images will instantly have the sharpness of a brand new camera and lens. It’s really that simple. It’s amazing what a well-metered image using a flash can do. Panasonic GX7– The GX7 is a camera that may go best with the lens due to its smaller size–which works best with the lens’s small size.The lens is also impressively quiet when using AF in video mode thanks to its stepper motor. We tested it with a Panasonic G9 and found the touchscreen makes it painless to move focus smoothly and silently, with just the tap of a finger.