That 14-150 is useless in low light, but when the sun is out, its pretty fun to be able to zoom around that range. I used it in the store and it was such a joy. If its purely for fun, thats a fun lens
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It’s a very fun lens and a great do-it-all lens when you don’t necessarily have a plan or know where you’ll end up. In short, a really nice travel option.
But…
I’m noticing the lack of optical quality in certain situations. At 150mm, it’s somewhat soft, especially away from the centre of the image. And it’s quite soft at the edges throughout the zoom range. This makes shooting in the high res modes a bit useless because it can’t resolve the detail very well. And of course, it’s not particularly fast and starts to struggle in low light, especially at the long end.
So I’m currently trying to decide on my next lens purchase and it’s not obvious. I had pretty much decided to get the 12-45mm F4 PRO, because it’s such a compact lens with great quality, and one of the reasons I bought into M43 was for the compact size. But with it still being F4 (albeit throughout the zoom range), and only offering 2mm extra at the wide end, it doesn’t really wow me too much in terms of an upgrade. Similarly, if I went for the 40-150 F4 PRO, it is still only offering a slight aperture advantage over my current 14-150 F4-5.6. Essentially, I would be just getting these lenses as replacements and for better sharpness.
So the other candidates would be the F2.8 lenses, namely the 12-40 F2.8 PRO and the 40-150 F2.8 PRO. The latter really appeals to me because I love telephoto landscape shots, but it is big and heavy and probably unwieldy on my OM-5. The 12-40 F2.8 would not be as bulky, but it’s still not exactly the compact lens I was looking for when investing in M43…
Anyway, this is a bit of a ramble, but I have decisions to make because I’m still undecided how much to invest in M43, or whether to keep my current kit as a travel option and invest in another system for the larger lenses.
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Rent them!
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Nowhere to rent near me unfortunately. I can’t even pick up certain bodies to try the ergonomics because it’s basically Sony, Canon and Nikon from big box stores, and that’s it. It’s really sad how few camera stores there are these days…
I don’t have anything new to say about this that I haven’t already said other times (about how great & fun has been my m43 experience, particularly when I upgraded to a used EM-1 and continuing to use the plastic/cheap lenses). But somebody mentioned the uberplasticky 40-150 and here’s an example of a photo that I took many years ago. Once again, incredible quality in such a humble package! much better than all the other plastic lenses I’ve tried for other systems (canon, nikon, etc).
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