The lens features an aperture ring near the front of the lens, and a distance scale in feet and meters behind the focus ring. The 49mm filter threads are metal, and the lens uses a metal mount to attach to the camera body. The 50mm ƒ/1.8 is built with all-metal construction, with a smooth black finish and a rubber focus ring near the middle of the lens. They just don't build them the way they used to, is the mantra when handling lenses of this era. The 50mm ƒ/1.8 OM Zuiko is a manual focus lens. The 50mm ƒ/1.8 is excellently optimized against distortion, showing just the slightest bit of barrel distortion (+0.1%) in the corners. Stopped down anything greater than that, and there is practically no light falloff. There is some significant fringing in areas of high contrast at ƒ/1.8 or ƒ/2.8, which is fairly evident in our sample photos.Ĭorner shading isn't really an issue with this lens, with the corners just 1/3 EV darker than the center when used wide open at ƒ/1.8. Obviously, sharp corner-to-corner performance is out of the question when used wide open at ƒ/1.8, but for portraits this isolating corner softness could be very useful.ĭespite the fact that the lens is quite long in the tooth, its multi-coating does a good job of reducing chromatic aberration - when the lens is stopped down to at least ƒ/4. Fully stopped down at ƒ/16, the lens provided results of 2 blur units across the frame. There is some negligible improvement at ƒ/8, and diffraction limiting sets in at ƒ/11 (even so, the lens is sharp at 1.5 blur units across the image). Stopping the lens down to ƒ/4 improves sharpness further, and by ƒ/5.6 the lens is essentially as sharp as it will get, with results of around 1.5 blur units across the frame. Stopped down to ƒ/2.8 however, this corner softness is very effectively reduced (4-5 blur units) and we see a larger and sharper central region (1.5 blur units). At this setting we note a fairly linear progression from a center point of relative sharpness (2 blur units) to corners which are very soft (9-12 blur units). Wide open at ƒ/1.8, the 50mm is not a sharp lens, particularly in the corners. The MF-2 lens adapter is available for $170. The lens is available used in the $50 range. This isn't necessarily a perfect representaton of how this lens would perform on a 35mm film camera, and it should not be seen as criticism of the old Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, which Senior Editor Shawn Barnett, the owner of this lens, can attest is a good quality optic on the OM-1. Add that it was designed for film, while Olympus's Zuiko Digital lenses were designed for sensors, and you have all the qualifiers you need. Olympus engineers warned us that a lens like this, designed for a 35mm body, would suffer in the corners and appear soft wide open, thanks partially to all the light bouncing around in the adapter and chamber. There were far too many versions made of this lens for us to review them all, and we won't likely be seeking out or posting reviews of other OM lenses as such, this was as much a test of the OM adapter as it was an older lens. We reviewed this lens out of curiosity to see what one might experience with an old OM lens on Olympus's latest digital camera. So in this case, the 50mm ƒ/1.8 operates effectively as a 100mm ƒ/1.8 lens. As a micro four thirds camera, the EP-1 produces a 2x ''crop factor,'' meaning lenses used with it provide an effective field of view that is double their listed focal length.
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