But the real game changer comes when you screw on the tiny Olympus 1.4x teleconverter – thus converting the Olympus into a 56-210mm F4 lens or 112-420mm F8 lens in full-frame terms. To have so much reach in such a high-performance compact lens is very unusual and damn enjoyable. What I don’t like about the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro

But if you are ready to meet its price tag and willing to carry it, the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 Pro is a formidable lens and will help you get shots you might otherwise miss. Get the latest photography news straight to your inbox by signing up to our newsletter. Newsletter SignupThe Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm f/2.8 Pro lens accepts 72mm screw-in filters. The thread does not rotate on focus, making the use of polarisers that much easier. Surprisingly, it didn’t seem to matter what focal length I chose. 40mm, 70mm, 150mm, they were all excellent corner to corner, and right from f/2.8 (no real need to stop down unless you need DOF). And I mean excellent, as in about the best you can obtain from the 16mp E-M1 sensor. If you nail focus, you have acuity. Excellent acuity. Indeed, in the Imatest charts it basically boiled down to this: The lens performed great wide open and didn’t really change much until I started hitting diffraction limits, at which point I could clearly see the diffraction impacts. That’s pretty much as good as it gets in terms of sharpness. 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.

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 40-150mm f/2.8 M.Zuiko Digital is one of what Olympus refers to as their “pro” m4/3 lenses. Beyond the obvious main specification—which would be 80-300mm (equivalent) with a “fast” aperture—the lens has other features that are found in Olympus’ “Pro” lineup, including a Splash Proof designation. We understand this can sometimes be difficult with work commitments, but we will do our best to accommodateyour needs. 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. 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.

Distortion is well corrected in camera, but without corrections applied, Imatest still only detected 0.342% pincushion distortion at 40mm being replaced with only 0.327% pincushion distortion at 150mm. This extremely mild amount of distortion should pose few issues for day-to-day shooting. This was however a brief one-day test. Since then I’ve had a chance to shoot with the 40-150mm for a solid month (this is Gordon speaking!). During this time, Olympus released firmware version 2.2 for the OMD EM1 which, amongst other things, promised greater focusing accuracy with the 40-150mm lens.

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For me though, I will be keeping the 40-150 + MC-20 combination even though it's more difficult to get sharp shots, requires more post processing, and is optically inferior. Why would I do this? Of course, such a lens does come with some built-in downsides. While it’s absurdly light for a zoom of its capabilities, it’s still a big heavy lens by most other measures. Therefore, its leave-at-home factor is higher than the smaller, less capable Olympus 40-150mm F4 Pro. And, of course, the Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 is one of Olympus’s more expensive lenses. 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) . 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. https://www.ephotozine.com/equipment/item/olympus-m-zuiko-digital-ed-40-150mm-f-2-8-pro-5661/images