50mm lens megadeath shootout

Apologies for the 'Fox News' title, but doing lens tests is so tedious that one needs to hype them up a bit .

Right, so for this little test the mission was - gather all the Zuiko Digital Olympus lenses in my possession that can be used at a 50mm focal length. I omitted a few MF lenses that can be used via an adapter. I also omitted lenses that I have on my Canon 5D as the reason for this test was to see how the lenses performed, not how the body performed.

Methodology:

Each lens was measured at their widest open aperture, f/4 (if that wasn't the widest aperture) and f/8. This should give a good coverage and show any differences relating to lenses.

Why 50mm? Well, it's an arbitrary focal length really, but nicely fits in with a number of lenses that I already possess. There is only the one 50mm prime lens (the f/2 macro) in the current Zuiko armoury, but the likes of the 14-54mm, the 12-60mm and the 50-200mm could also be used for that focal length.

The shots were taken using the Olympus E-3, the latest (and possibly greatest) 4:3rds body currently available. The camera was mounted on a sturdy tripod, and each shot was taken with a 10 second 'anti-shock' setting and wired cable release. The focusing was determined using the Live View mode with 10x zoom on the critical focus area (the Rolex (imitation sadly) in the centre of the image). Other objects were placed in the same plane of focus for corner crop purposes.

A number of shots were taken at each aperture with the sharpest chosen. Images were uploaded into Lightroom, and then modified and cropped in Photoshop where my standard unmask sharpening was applied (300, 0.3 , 0) and the images were finally converted to 8 bit JPEGS in sRGB mode.

The lenses in use were as follows:

ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 50mm 1:2.0 Macro

ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 12-60mm 1:2.8-4.0 SWD

ZUIKO DIGITAL 14-54mm 1:2.8-3.5

ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6

ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 50-200mm 1:2.8-3.5


The eagle eyed amongst you will note that the 14-42mm does not in fact have 50mm within it's zoom range! This was just a fun lens test to throw in as it's a lovely and tiny zoom that works great on the dinky E-400, and so I slapped on the EC-14 teleconverter to enable 50mm usage. Obviously you would be mad to rush out and buy the EC-14 purely in order to use your 14-42mm at 50mm, but I added it in - to paraphrase George Mallory when asked why he attempted to climb Everest - because it was there.


Test Shots



OK - so on to the images. I've pasted the crops from each lens so that it makes for easier side by side viewing - so apologies for those on dialup or 12" monitors if these crops seem too big.

First batch of images: Centre crop.

Each crop has a caption explaining the lens and the aperture.






Thanks to James on DPR for making me revisit the 50mm f/2 shots. At first I believed I had the sharpest example in this crop, but indeed it was a touch out of focus. I've since amended the crops to include the best of the 50mm f/2 shots and I think we can agree that this lens is superb even when wide open.

You have probably noticed a couple of images in the above crops appearing more than once. This is because some of the lenses are simply not wide enough to fit into a 'wide open', 'moderately wide open' or a 'stepped down' category, so I've placed them in more than one to keep the lens order intact. Hopefully that makes sense...



Next, the corner crops:






Finally, a conclusion.


Hmm, well I'd be happy with any of them, but that probably doesn't make for good copy. I was blown away with how well the 50-200mm works wide open. I've always thought of it as a sharp lens, but for such a long zoom I think it's exceptional at f/2.8.

As for the ongoing debate about whether the new 12-60mm is better than the 14-54mm - I think they're too close to call. What I like about the 12-60mm is the little extra each at either end and the SWD AF mechanism. However, the 14-54mm works extremely well on the E-3 too and I doubt if there's a strong case to sell one for the other unless you really needed that extra reach. It is noticeable how much extra detail the 12-60mm manages to extract from the background compared to the other lenses at the same aperture (it can be seen clearly at f/8 ) .

The 50mm is at an apparent disadvantage at f/2 but still pulls through. You can see the quality of this lens throughout the range of apertures. It's a one trick pony as far as focal length goes, but obviously has the other party trick of being a superb macro lens.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the 35-100mm will work at 50mm @ f/2 (I managed to pick one up at a good UK price and just waiting for it to slip through customs...). I suspect it will be more than a match for any of the above.


Original images are here:
50mm f/2
50mm f/4
50mm f/8

12-60mm f/4
12-60mm f/8

14-54mm f/3.4
14-54mm f/4
14-54mm f/8

50-200mm f/2.8
50-200mm f/4
50-200mm f/8


14-42mm + EC-14 f/7.6
14-42mm + EC-14 f/8