Monday, December 2, 2013

A selection of micro four thirds (m4/3, MFT) lenses on a few Panasonic bodies … are they sharp?

You tell me … the following screen shots are 100% crops from Lightroom 5. The reflect a tiny portion of an overall image and show what can be done even at mid to high ISO …

The 100-300 is one of my favourite lenses. At 600mm effective, you can get some great detail and I find it very sharp with excellent micro-contrast, even wide open.

g5_100300

g5_100-300B

I’m sure that we can agree that this is a reasonable performance from the G5 and this lens. I also really enjoy shooting the 14-140 mark 1, although this one does need stopping down from 5.6 to 6.3 to get sharp. I sometimes shoot at 7.1 just to be sure.

g5_14-140

There were all shot in a casual set of circumstances while on vacation and all are candids. Which is to say that I had no control over the movement of the subjects.

Even the lowly GF3 got into the act … with a rather lovely sharpness with the 45mm 1.8. One simply cannot complain about eyelashes like that.

g5_45mm

And of course the cheapest lens in the bunch also does a pretty marvelous job of rendering the eyelashes with great precision.

g5_19mm

The topic of sharpness has come up several times in recent months on the m4/3 forum at DPReview.com … and frankly I am of the opinion that you should be able to get decently sharp images from any of the body lens combinations. You just have to master the right technique …

Just thought I would point out that there are many bodies and lenses and they all have the ability to deliver noce sharp results.