Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150 mm F2.8 PRO Lens, Telephoto Zoom, Suitable for All MFT Cameras (Olympus OM-D & PEN Models, Panasonic G Series), Black

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Perhaps the only downside with this lens is the appearance of some chromatic aberration. It's mostly visible as light purple and green fringing at the shorter focal lengths and most seen in the corners both wide open and stopped down to ƒ/8. By the time you zoom into 70mm, however, the visible corner CA is greatly reduced and continues to be very minimal to virtually invisible at longer focal lengths and at all apertures. Of course the caveat, as with any teleconverter on any format, is a reduced maximum aperture of a given lens. A 2x converter results in a 2-stop reduction, meaning that the 40-150mm f/2.8 becomes an 80-300mm f/5.6, and so on. Of course, size is not everything (not always). If you’re looking to shoot moving subjects in light conditions – the larger and brighter Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro will get the better shot more often. The Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro is an optically excellent, high-performance, metal-cased beast of a lens and perhaps the best telephoto zoom I’ve ever used. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Storm clouds and drizzle early in the day looked like the perfect conditions for putting the lens’s weather sealing to the test, but the sun broke through in true British fashion so we’ll just have to wait until our final review sample arrives (hopefully in the next few weeks) before we can subject it to a soaking and see how it performs in this respect.

Of course, the µ4/3rds image will be 1/4 the area, and if you blow it up to have the same print size as the full-frame image, it will have less DoF. But what you’ve done in that case is you’ve enlarged the pixels — depth-of-field is dependent on reproduction ratio! Which is where the “Fool Frame Fanatics” come up with their DoF goofiness. But when I say carry, I mean leave at home. In contrast, I was happy to carry the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 all weekend. Teleconverter A little heavy for the m4/3 system but not too much so. Keep in mind it is equivalent to an 80-300 F2.8 full frame angle of view. It’s fair to say this has been a highly anticipated lens, seamlessly continuing where the 12-40mm stops, and delivering an 80-300mm equivalent range that’s desired by close-range action as well as street and portrait shooters. Now with two lenses, Olympus can take you from an equivalent of 24mm all the way to 300mm with a constant f2.8 focal ratio throughout, and while the 40-150mm is obviously one of the larger lenses in the catalogue, it remains compact for a lens for its class. As well as superior optics and performance, the Pro tag denotes high quality construction with an all metal body that is dust, splash and freeze-proof. The lens also comes with a removable lens collar for tripod mounting, as well as a collapsible lens hood. Olympus also offers a 1.4x teleconverter especially for the 40-150mm which extends the reach to an equivalent of 421mm with a maximum aperture of f4. I’ve provided three samples with it in my gallery, but here’s one as a preview. You can find the same shot taken without the teleconverter for comparison in my gallery and note the aperture selected delivered the best result in this instance.When it gets it right the 40-150mm f2.8 produces stunningly sharp detail. This time set to S-AF mode with the light fading, but still bright enough to shoot wide open at 200 ISO with the stabilisation enabled. It's not just the focal length and aperture that are doubled; the MC-20 also doubles the maximum shooting magnification of the mounted lens, which opens the door for unparalleled super telephoto macro photography. Staying with optics, another important difference between the lenses is the presence of optical stabilisation on the Leica, which in my tests delivered up to six stops of compensation at 200mm. In contrast, the Olympus lens is unstabilised, instead relying on body-based stabilisation in your camera. If you have an unstabilised body, then the Leica is much more attractive thanks to its optical compensation.

Ok... so I'm not sure that I made it clear with my prior post, but I find that the ZD 50-200 f2.8-3.5 ED + EC-14 is a superior optical combination over the mZD 40-150 f2.8 PRO + MC-20 (for my copies at least) . Inside the 40-150mm f2.8 Pro there are 16 elements in 10 groups including ED, Super ED, EDA and HD elements. Essentially these technologies are designed to reduce internal light dispersion (ED stands for Extra-low dispersion, EDA is Extra-low Dispersion Aspheric and HD is High refractive index & Dispersion) and improve image quality and contrast.

Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO Specifications

The size of the focus ring is fairly modest compared to the large zoom ring, but this didn’t prove to be a cause for concern in use. Olympus 40-150mm First Look – The best MFT telephoto lens to date? The most obvious alternative to the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 is the Olympus 40-150mm F4 Pro. While the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro is more capable thanks to its faster F2.8 aperture and dual AF motors, the much lighter and cheaper Olympus 40-150mm F4 does, broadly speaking, the same thing. I was particularly interested to see how the Leica DG 50-200mm f2.8-4 compared to the Olympus 40-150mm f2.8 PRO zoom. In terms of sharpness across the frame in my tests, the Olympus visibly out-performed the Leica in the corners between 50 and 100mm at large apertures, while being a tad crisper in the middle too. At 150mm though the Leica pulled ahead a little in the corners, at least until stopped-down, and of course it keeps zooming on to a longer length of 200mm. But if you’re mostly shooting between 50 and 100mm, the Olympus delivered sharper results in my tests, particularly in the corners. f2.8-3.5 - This lens is an incredible optic as well, especially for the time period that it was designed. For it to be a hair behind in center sharpness when being designed when something like 5MP sensors were all the rage is incredible. It is a bit less contrasty, but I have zero issues with this lens optically. The corners are not as sharp, but with this type of lens I'm usually centering the subject and never noticed any softness in real world shooting in the corners. Although not the first M.ZUIKO Pro series lens to feature a dust, splash and freezeproof construction (this goes to the M.ZUIKO Digital ED 12-40mm f/2.8), it’s the first telephoto lens in the range that’s been made to withstand the severity of professional use.