Olympus 7-14mm - Reviews by PhotoCamel Members

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Olympus 7-14mm

Reviews	Views	Date of last review
3	684	Wed February 27, 2008

Recommended By	Average Price	Average Rating
100% of reviewers	$1,345.00	9.3

supersize

Description:	Extreme wide angle lens with 2x zoom Super ED & ED element for minimum chromatic aberration Splash-proof Pro lens The ZUIKO DIGITAL 7-14mm (35mm equivalent focal length: 14-28mm) offers a 114° angle of view - currently the world's widest digital zoom lenses. The minimum working distance is just 10 cm, allowing exaggerated perspectives. Its complex lens design ensures excellent image quality even at extreme picture angles.
Keywords:	Olympus 7-14mm
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Author

LJBD
Vicuna

Registered: January 2007
Posts: 106

Review Date: Sun April 8, 2007

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 10

Pros:	Excellent performance, stunning effects.
Cons:	Difficult to manage, vulnerable, inherently prone to flare

Let's be clear - I love this lens, it is the one I normally leave attached to the camera. No other lens can do quite what it does, and it is so mechanically and optically crazy it is a miracle it works at all, let alone really well.

The Silver Ring on the front of the lens means it is the Top Pro range, which means it should cost a fortune. Actually, although it is an expensive lens, the pricing is below the rest of the Top Pro range, and only double the 11-22 - I think the Top Pro designation is a (faulty) marketing choice, and this lens sits well in the Pro range, offering quite reasonable value for money.

Having said all that, the rest of what I have to say is a list of imperfections - inevitably, because you can see what it is supposed to do, and you can see that it does it, and here are the gotchas:

At 7mm In bright light whichever way you point this lens you are either going to find your own shadow in the field of view, or else have direct sunlight hitting the insanely curved front element. The curve of the element means no filters, so welcome to Planet Paranoia.

Weight is considerable - this, plus an E330, is a pain to have round your neck all day.

Add up the gotchas, and this a lens to own in tandem with the 11-22: as a replacement it is not entirely satisfactory.

Conclusion - no lens this extreme is going to be easy, but for anyone who like original angles, it is more or less a must. Buy one.

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Louis

http://www.flickr.com/photos/acam

Paul Shields

senses working overtime

Registered: July 2005
Location: Liverpool, UK
Posts: 11245

Review Date: Sun November 25, 2007

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $890.00 | Rating: 9

Pros:	Very accurate lens
Cons:	Flares easily if Sun is in the frame.

This is a really first class lens for the 4:3rds system. It removes any doubt about the difficulty of the smaller sensor being useful for wide angle. Please see my blog entry for more details on this lens.

http://photocamel.com/forum/blogs/pa...ko-7-14mm.html

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keepright

Guanaco

Registered: February 2008
Location: Toronto, Canada
Posts: 298

Review Date: Wed February 27, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $1,800.00 | Rating: 9

Pros:	Amazing coverage and very well corrected
Cons:	Flare can be an issue, step learning curve

This is an astonishing lens. It suffers from virtually no optical distortion, and what little there is can easily be corrected in Photoshop. The build quality is excellent, zoom is smooth, and focusing is quick.

All ultra-wide lenses will create geometric and perspective distortion, so there is a learning curve involved. It's also easy to get carried away with it and create photographs that lack basic composition and subjects. But neither of these are faults of the lens, they are instead a challenge for the photographer. Used well, this lens will create photographs that would otherwise be impossible. Used badly, like any lens, it's a waste of pixels.

The 7-14 is an excellent reason to buy a 4/3 camera, and it matches beautifully with the E-3. It's also worth noting that in my years on Olympus and general photography forums, I can't recall a single case of someone scratching or damaging the front element. A google search also failed to produce any examples. Be careful with it -- don't advance on a subject with the camera to your eye, because objects are closer than they appear -- but I would not consider this lens to be "vulnerable".

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Matthew Robertson
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