Last week I added a new lens to the Olympus Pen E-P1 kit I'm building. With the Olympus supplied 17mm pancake lens and the 14-42mm zoom the short end of the scale is almost covered. But with a 2x conversion factor in 35mm photography terms 42mm didn't quite give me enough reach, especially as I'm planning on using it for video when my high school son's diving season starts up.
The four thirds world is still pretty new, meaning there is not a real wide variety of choices and the micro four thirds standard used by the Pen has even less choices. (There are four thirds to micro four thirds adapters but I didn't want to invest in a $170 adapter just yet unless I really have to.) Panasonic has some very nice and fairly expensive longer lenses available but what caught my eye was the quite affordable Lumix 45-200mm f/4-5.6 zoom. At just over $300 this is very much a "kit" lens. It's not very fast and the optics are not pro lens caliber. But the quality of it is quite good, the zoom and focus rings have just the right amount of resistance and when zoomed out to 200mm (equivalent to 400mm) it's still very compact.
I haven't really had a chance to take the new lens out for a good evaluation, but at lunchtime today collected some weed flowers growing outside my office door and did a little macro shooting. (Well as close to macro as the lens will focus, which isn't all that close.) As expected it's a little slow focusing and doesn't have a near/far switch to help out, but the lens does have stabilization built into it (but of course so does the Pen so that's not really needed). I think I'll like this lens for it's intended purpose and, as I'm building this kit as a travel outfit, the versatility at it's compact size should be just right. I'll post most images from this lens as I get a chance to shoot more.
Enjoy!
Tom Laux
September 14, 2009
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