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Home » Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Review – Better than Full Frame? Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Review – Better than Full Frame? What surprised me was the performance of the E-M1/40-150 in low-light. Aside from dance show, I also decided to test the lens for the Electric Run 2014 where people participate in a non-competitive marathon at night wearing fluorescent and brightly-lit clothing. I was curious to see how the lens would behave in such a difficult situation where even other photographers with DSLR cameras were having a hard time. Surprisingly the camera and the lens worked really well and I only really found myself in trouble when the scene had a too little contrast or almost no light. The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple.
With the lens set to its maximum aperture, you can see some light fall-off in the corners but it will not be overly noticeable in your real-life photos.The 40-150mm f2.8 Pro is the first Olympus lens to feature dual VCM auto focus. The idea is that AF performance can be improved by separating the focusing mechanism into two lens groups controlled by individual linear drive voice coil motors. This and the absence of gears, claims Olympus, makes the focussing performance lightning fast and very smooth. There isn’t much else to say in conclusion except that which I said at the start: the 40-150mm is a wonderful lens. Along with having great optical performance and a versatile zoom range, it is also an important step forward for a system that is becoming more and more mature and complete with solutions that can suit amateurs, enthusiasts and professional photographers. E-M1, 1/100, f/ 2.8, ISO 3200 The OM System 40-150mm f4 Pro is capable of focusing as close as 27 inches from the front of the lens. At 150mm, that’s about a .41x macro on a 35mm equivalent. It gets in pretty close for atelephoto lens. Both focusing and zooming are fully internal, meaning the lens' optics adjust within the constraints of its outer barrel, so the length of the lens remains the same regardless of zoom and focus settings. The zoom and the focus rings are smooth in action without being loose. As you’d expect there’s a rotating tripod collar, and that collar can be removed if you’re going to handhold the lens. Unlike some tripod collars (I’m looking at you, Nikon), the foot extension is about as solid as they come; I couldn’t detect any flex in it, and considering the light overall weight of a setup you’d be using with it in place, I can’t imagine that the tripod collar itself would be a source of vibration or ringing of other vibrations.
A collapsible circular hood is supplied with this lens, which does an excellent job of shading the lens from extraneous light that may cause issues with loss of contrast or flare. Even without the hood in place, this lens is very resistant to flare and contrast levels are retained well when shooting into the light. Regarding stabilisation, the 5-axis stabilisation of the E-M1 handled the bigger and heavier lens very well, and I managed to get acceptable results down to 1/3 of a second. At the 150mm end, the angle of view narrows to 8.2°, equivalent to that of a 300mm lens mounted to a 35mm full-frame camera.
Within the Micro Four Thirds range, the closest rival is Panasonic’s 35-100mm f2.8 which measures 67mm in diameter 100mm in length and weighs 360g, significantly smaller and around half the weight of the Olympus. That difference is all the more remarkable when you consider the Panasonic lens is optically stabilised where the M.Zuiko 40-150mm relies on the built-in stabilisation of Olympus OMD and PEN bodies to iron-out any wobbles. That said, there is of course also a substantial difference in the respective zoom ranges of these two with the Panasonic lens’s ‘classic’ 70-200mm equivalent range starting slightly wider but stopping well short of the 80-300mm equivalent range of the Olympus lens.
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