My Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8 review

After comment from LeeRo (he has a strong Flickr which worth to take a look!), I decided to take the Olympus 17mm and give it a go.

First of all, 35mm equivalent focal length is the best to me, it is just something can't be replaced by other focal length. It give you the story and drama to your capture which is really hard reproduce in 50mm or 85mm. People will then say how about 28mm, I would say 28mm is good for scenery but it is not as versatile as 35mm because you still can take close up shots with 35mm without too much distortion and it just can't for 28mm.

Now is about the Olympus 17mm. I like it a lot because it is sharp, instantly fast autofocus (unlike the Panasonic 20mm/f1.7), and also has really smooth and subtle rendering, of course also with the Olympus color signature (more warmish color tone). 

Images start now:

Since the period of Chinese New Year, most of the shop are closed. I don't think you can see it other than CNY.

This is the shot only with a little bit of curve adjustment, with no color correction.

Even shot in a overcast day, you can see the color rendering of this lens is really good.

100% crop

 

It has quite a lot of details and I would say it is sharp enough in reality 

100% crop

This is the example of the scenery from the 35mm equivalent !

The bokeh is just creamy and smooth  

100% crop

I like this capture, I do think it was a interesting gesture while he was falling asleep.

















100% crop.

It shows how much details this lens can show.

First of all I didn't sharpen the image at all!, the Most important thing is, the better the light, the better the dynamic range.

Daytime is over...

I did some minor color adjustment(color cross processing) in photoshop for these two



100%crop

Final image

I will not doing any scientific testing because I'm an amateur photographer, not a tester and all I like to do is to taking images.

From my experience so far, Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8 is a really good lens and I have shown no regret to make the purchase at all. Compare it to Panasonic 20mm/f1.7, 17mm has better field of view, and a lot faster autofocus. Olympus gives you warmer color tone compare to Panasonic and I have no problem with both. Since I had sold my panny, I can't compare to the sharpness, but olympus 17mm looks sharp enough to me. The big difference between both is usability, I just couldn't trust the panny 20mm autofocus in any lowlight condition.

All the image are processed in Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 with curve adjustment and black and white filter only. (The first two nightshots process with Color Efex Pro cross processing filter)

Please feel free to comments!

If you feel my images are interesting, please feel free to go Flickr to check out my stuff.