Olympus M. Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 Macro

Here I am wondering why this has taken me for so long. Why only now I´m finally finishing writing about this lens which I have had already for a month. Maybe I got a bit disillusioned with it as I was expecting too much? After all this lens turned only to be an extremely sharp and contrasty macro lens which focuses up to 1:1 AND focused lightning fast from infinity to 19cm (1:1) AND was water proof during many hours in the rain (walking the dog, you know) AND costed just 499€. So what more was I expecting? Maybe I merely wished it to beat Olympus Zuiko D. 50mm Macro as an allround lens. Which it didn´t. It only is a better macro lens. Which actually is quite a lot. 

Description

All the exact specs of this lens can be found at Olympus´ web sites. I won´t repeat them here, just a few notions. First of all this lens is light but feels solid and well built.  It has internal focusing, which means that its length stays the same always. This is very good for close up and macro photography. Internal focusing is engineered with three lens groups which move relative to each other and, of course, relative to fixed lenses and groups. According to Olympus this their most complex internal focusing system. The reason for this comes of course from the huge task of being able to produce sharp images as well at infinity as at the highest magnification ratio of 1:1. Auto focusing is silent and instantaneous regardless of magnification.

Magnification ratio of 1:1 means that you can shoot e.g. a 1cm long object and it is produced as 1cm long image on the camera sensor. If you make an A4 print (longer edge c. 30cm), then this object would be about 17cm long on print, depending on how you crop the image. 

Like a good macro lens should, this lens is provided with focusing limiters. You can limit auto focusing to ranges 0.19m - ∞, 0.4m - ∞, 0.19m - 0.4m or have the lens fixed at 1:1 magnification which means focusing distance of 19cm.

Filter thread is 46mm. Olympus has a bayonet type lens hood (LH-49) for this lens, which sadly is not included with the lens. This lens hood is very handy as it can be pulled over the lens barrel for transportation to keep the length of this combination the same as lens alone. I have seen and tried this lens hood but did not have one during testing the lens. Anyway it is a must have accessory and Olympus should include one with this lens.

General Photography

To see where I got stuck with my strange disillusionment, let´s start with some quite ordinary photos:

This is a lens which focuses really fast. While my subject has some blur from turning his head, the image still has nice sharpness. Wide open, f/2.8, 1/160s at ISO 200. This image was shot with OM-D like all the other photos in this blog. All images were exposed as RAW files and converted into jpegs in Lightroom 4.1. All crops are 100% with one image pixel correspondin to one pixel on screen.

Another quick street shot. Again wide open, 1/125s at ISO 200.

iPads seem to have central shutters. The Louvre, wide open, 1/125 s at ISO 640.

Moody sunset, and again wide open, 1/125s at ISO 400. 

This image is shot through a thick security window and it actually is a panorama of two frames. Here the aperture is at f/4, 1/320s at ISO 200.

These shots above show that 60mm Macro lens has excellent sharpness and contrast already wide open in central image area.

60mm Macro lens has also very nice and peaceful bokeh. These two images above are of course shot wide open.

Another test showed that shooting against bright lights is no problem. Some reflections, yes, but if you think about shooting against those lights while the rest of scene is very dark (f/2.8, 1/125s at ISO 5000), the result is very acceptable. At least for me.

The list of goodness goes on: This new 60mm lens does not suffer (while working with Lightroom 4) from distortions or fringing. There is very little chromatic aberration and it gets easily corrected by checking Lightroom´s Remove Chromatic Aberration feature. So, what an earth was wrong for me?

Test target with reference lens

It is easist to show by putting the 60mm lens against the very good FT Zuiko D. 50mm f/2 Macro lens in a controlled situation. The latter lens can be seen as a reference lens for other lenses. In whole mFT world there is only one lens that beats it, the M. Zuiko 75mm f/1.8.

Here´s the results of image center:

As can be seen 60mm lens is slightly better at f/2.8 but loses to 50mm starting from f/5.6. Now, come on! Actually there is no real difference between these lenses, the central image area is superb with both lenses until difraction hits. In these crops I have normalized contrast and other factors to show sharpness, but actually 60mm lens has better contrast than 50mm lens, whose contrast is relatively low by latest standard.

So, it as not there. Then, how about the edges? Here it comes:

Here´s why I started this blog with a negative remark. 60mm Macro is not as brilliant as an allround lens as the 50mm Macro is. Corners are weaker at normal shooting distances. Again, I must emphasize that this target is very harsh and these differencies are not seen this well in everyday photography. But I am picky. Olympus´ both short mFT teles, the 45mm f/1.8 and the 75mm f/1.8, are also better in the corners but you can´t see any real difference between all these four lenses in the center. So this new 60 mm Macro lens is not perfect for brick walls and landscapes, but it would make an excellent portrait lens. I tend to use image edges quite actively in my photography, that´s why I became worried about edge performance from the very start. Now, this is enough for general photography, we are speaking here about a macro lens, after all! 

Shooting lenses against each other close up

This image is shot at the closest range of the FT Zuiko D. 50mm Macro lens. This means magnification ratio of 1:2. And then, of course, I shot this watch also with the new 60mm lens. Ideally there should not be anything else to do than change the lens. Right? No. Those who say now that the 60mm lens would give a narrower field of view are simply wrong. I had the same assuption, and was wrong too. Actually at this magnification the 60mm Macro has a wider field of view than the 50mm Macro. Macro (and most other) lenses do not have the same focal length (or field of view) throughout the whole focusing range. The nominal focal length is actually true only when the lens is focused at infinity. With these lenses it happens that the 50mm Macro gets "longer" faster than the 60mm Macro, while going closer to the subject. So, I had to do some field of view adjustments into the very direction I was not prepared to do while setting up my stuff. That´s why I was not finally sure if the angle of watch relative to camera was exactly the same for both lenses. Very minor differencies can lead here into wrong results and opinions. I was too lazy to start all over from the start and that´s why I will show here only crops from the exact focusing point, which for both lenses was the center of number 6.

Interestingly, we see here the very same behaviour as earlier, only now the new 60 mm lens is sharper than the 50mm lens for almost over all of the best aperture range. As said, I have no head to head comparison images to show but in macro area this is actually true over the whole image, not just central area. Beyond f/8 diffraction hits both lenses and again the 60mm lens suffers more and faster. 

The whole image area: digitizing slides

Digitizing slides and negatives is one application I had envisaged for this 60 mm Macro lens. I have owned several scanners from drum scanners through Imacon (later Hasseblad) Flextight to Nikon 4000 ED. Of these, only the Nikon with its automatic feeder for up to 50 framed color slides is practical for scanning any larger amount of slides. It also has quite good quality especially with multisampling and it is the best of all slide scanners together with its slightly improved successor, the 5000 ED. Present flatbed scanners are not good enough for scanning 35mm film, not for me at least. As those Nikon scanners have their definitive weak points, I have also tried, as an alternative, to digitize 35mm film material with Canon EOS 5D MkII. I have used both EF 50mm f/2.5 Macro lens with Life-Size Converter and 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens, both with a slide copying attachment. Results were at the same level as with Nikon 4000 ED scanner. Only the thick low pass filter of 5D mkII plus its weak exposure system made it difficult to achieve a really snappy look and fast workflow. Now, during the past weeks, I have tested quite thoroughly the same with the 60mm macro lens and OM-D.  

This image was digitized by shooting a frame of Kodak Ektachrome 35mm color slide film. With the 60mm Macro lens you can go up to 1:1 which means that you can (and then actually need to) capture the 35 mm color slide as four quadrants. Here I did not go quite up to 100% but settled for a somewhat lesser magnification to get some overlapping edges for these four quadrants to make it easier to compose the image back together. What I did was simply to import the four RAW files into Lightroom, choose them and use the command Photo > Edit In > Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. The rest is automatic and you only need to crop the final image in Photoshop or Lightroom. With my ETTR method I do not need to do any bracketing, everything is quite straightforward, absolutely fool proof and, most of all, very fast. The size of this digitized image is circa 7700 x 5050 pixels and, believe me, it has more potential resolution than can be found in any 35mm color film frame. The crop is a 100% detail from the landing gear. It is here slightly over sharpened to better show the quality of grain. Namely, that´s film grain, not camera noise, and it tells how sharp this capture is. (It´s a wholly another matter if the image on slide was sharp or not!) You simply can not get any details beyond film grain. I also applied some color noise reduction to make grain even more uniform. This quality is better than any slide scanner can produce and better than I could or can achieve with EOS 5D MkII. Of course I can also shoot 35mm slides at 1:2 magnification and get the slide as one capture. And still it turned out that the detail is at the same or better level as with my former scans and captures.

One benefit with this system compared to the 4000 ED is that it does not need, like Nikon scanner does, the very best slide frames to keep the film absolutely flat. Which frames, by the way, are teethed Bonum frames and they have not been made any more for several years. With the Nikon scanner you do not get sharp grain over the whole image area if film is not flat. With macro lens you get plenty of DOF (well, compared to scanners, at least) and you can use pretty much any cheap plastic frames, like I had here in this test image. These specific frames have actually proven to be absolutely unusable for scanning with 4000ED. Of course, the flatter the film is while capturing, the higher the absolute quality is also here. While there is no free lunches, there is at least some latitude instead of just frustration. 

For me these tests were the final proof for M. Zuiko 60mm Macro being the tool for me. While testing I was impressed by the very flat image plane, high level of sharpness and contrast over the whole image area, just slightly darker corners with slightly less sharpness, no distortion or fringing to speak of, only a slight chromatic aberration... Not perfect but really good. The sweet aperture range regarding image quality in macro area is from f/4 to f/5.6. I settled to use f/5 as the peak aperture after my tests. Peak here does not really mean anything too obvious as f/5 is not that different from the rest inside the mentioned sweet range. It only happened to be the aperture I found out choosing almost always from my final 4 x 100+ sweet range test captures.

A few more close ups

Although I have done lots and lots of product photography down to the size of jewelry, macro photography is not one of my hobbies. Still I love to do some nature details with extremely shallow DOF from time to time. Here are some more sharpness vs. bokeh test shots with this 60mm Macro lens. They should be quite self explanatory.

f/4.0, 1/1600s, ISO 200

f/3.5, 1/160s, ISO 200

f/3.5, 1/160s, ISO 400

Conclusions

M. Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 Macro is a great macro lens. Small, light, splash proof and has very fast and silent internal focusing with focus limiters. As a macro lens, it is actually difficult to find any negative things to say about it. Sharpness and contrast are at very high level. RAW images opened into Lightroom 4 do not suffer from distortions or fringing and CA is a non-issue. I have not compared this lens head to head with other macro lenses than Zuiko D. 50mm f/2 Macro lens and after this test I have no need or interest to. I already ordered one.

As a lens for general photography it is better than any Olympus mFT zoom which has the same focal length. But it also is not as good as Zuiko M. 45mm f/1.8 or 75mm f/1.8. While it has practically no vices, it still falls somewhere between those two groups because of its weaker corners. But at the same time there are genres like portraiture where there would be no difference in image quality compared to the best mFT/FT lenses.

-p-

Olympus 15mm f/8 - Walking the Dog and Having Fun

Olympus 15mm f/8 is a tiny lens, extending only 9 mm from camera body. It has a closing mechanism and when closed it is like a body cap. Olympus even calls it Body Cap Lens. When opened it can be manually focused with the lever under the lens. End points are at infinity and 30 cm. Close to infinity is a hyperfocal setting which gives sharpness starting from 1m upwards. Aperture is set at f/8. The idea is to use hyperfocal setting for general shooting. When close up near to 30 cm you can actually try focusing with the lever.

The lens has three elements. Opitically it is okayish, I would say almost but not as good as kit zoom at the same focal length. I have not tried them head to head but will check that later.

What is it for?  

I have seen several threads in the internet starting with the same message: I don´t understand what´s the point with this lens. Well, it depends what you are after. If you have Zuiko M. 17mm f/2.8 or Lumix 14mm f/2.5, you don´t gain anything with this lens but even better pocketability and instant lens cap. You can use both of those lenses at f/8, with fixed focus and get almost the same field of view plus do a lot more. And they are sharper, too. But then, there is a certain effect with some equipment. An effect which shapes how you shoot with it. This lens is one of those. It forces you to play with its terms or suffer. It is kind of a one trick pony with all it´s restrictions, but an interesting one.

Olympus is marketing it to be "ready for capturing wide-angle shots whenever a photo opportunity comes your way". Actually not really. Aperture f/8 is far too dim to be usable (without flash) casually in a traditional P&S style whenever, if you expect normally sharp images. You really have to set your eye and mind to f/8 and work with the consequensies of it, namely blur. Or then use flash as a signature, which also is interesting, but I have not yet been there with this lens.

Walking the dog

That´s what I do every morning. And it gave me a chance to do my first test for an idea for a particular shooting style with this lens. I attached 15mm lens to my old and trusty E-P2. I set E-P2 to shoot B&W jpeg with Auto-ISO up to ISO 1600. These 34 images are a short story from four morning walks:

 

-p-

Discussion with Mr. Terada

During Photokina I had a meeting with Toshiyuki Terada, Manager and Group Leader of the Product and Marketing Planning Group from Olympus Imaging Corp. Present at the meeting were also Julia Rauther, Communications Manager from Olympus Europe and Henrik Tanabe, Product Manager from Olympus Finland. Our meeting was not really an interview, because as such interviews seldom lead to any new information beyond company FAQ, but a somewhat crisscrossing discussion on various issues and backgrounds on mFT and also FT when the latter had relevance with mFT. That's why this text is also written in the form of my synthesis of discussion. 

We started by looking at some of my images, shot with PEN and OM-D bodies and various lenses. Mr. Terada was most interested in seeing OM-D images. These images led into comments on several usability issues.

One of them was of course the present ability to use FT lenses only with quite restricted AF capabilities with mFT cameras. We agreed on the great value invested in FT lenses, both for Olympus and for owners of FT lenses, me included. I have been using mostly 12-60 mm zoom, 50 mm macro and 150 mm tele lenses but also tested various lenses from 9 to 300 mm plus tele extenders. A few weeks ago I met Mr. Akira Watanabe from Olympus Imaging and he told me that there will be new bodies with which FT lenses will have their real AF performance. Now Mr. Terada gave me a similar, very strong assurance for the future usability of FT lenses. The words were different as Mr. Watanabe told me exactly how he sees FT lenses´ AF capabilities  being integrated with future bodies. Because of confidentiality I can't write more on this. Now the situation was more official and Mr. Terada was not as candid on how this integration will be implemented and used more words like "investigate", "research", "discuss" and "no decision (on particular implementation) yet". Even so the message was clear

Thinking about expansion of OM-D series, there are two directions. One is filling the obvious gap between latest PENs and EM-5. And the other is the need for a (more) professional OM-D body. Which one of these will be coming first was not answered. Also filling the gap between these two series may come from either direction, as a more advanced camera belonging to PEN series or as a less advanced camera belonging to OM-D series. I would go for the first option, but that's just my hunch.

As a sensor issue I asked why there is no ISO 100 in OM-D as it has a Sony sensor. Mr. Terada replied that he can not discuss where the sensor is from. What he told is that they chose a sensor design which has image quality emphasis on higher ISO values rather than having a low base ISO. Lack of ISO 100 is not based on the programming of the sensor but comes from sensor's actual qualities and its base ISO is at 200.

One thing which I sort of sensed during our conversation was that life has been tough at Olympus R&D. There are problems created somewhere else, and I read between the lines that some features or lack of them in products have been born rather out of necessity to deliver products now than out of a longer term continuum and plan. Olympus has been struggling and stretching their resources to survive. Now, a week later, we know that sensor technology from Sony is part of the new agreement between Olympus and Sony. Already during our discussion Mr. Terada told that technologies like PDAF (phase detecting auto focus) on sensor and focus peaking are available for them, although "no decision yet" about usage.

I, personally,  am not too sure of either. I have used Sony NEX-7 and tried Leica M. Focus peaking is not reliable in either of them unless you use magnification and then peaking is not really needed. PDAF elements on sensor are dead pixels for the actual image. To make PDAF fast and reliable you need lots of PDAF pixels, eventually lots of areas of pixels on sensor, which means dead areas in actual image. All these must be filled in with interpolated data from surrounding pixels. The better PDAF on sensor you make, the more it affects image quality. The more and the smaller focusing points you want, the more you suffer in image quality. Mr. Terada agreed on my concerns but obviously there is a strong demand for both of these features because of marketing reasons. However, it is not widely realised that some present PDAF on sensor systems like the one in Canon EOS-M (and EOS D650) can only give the initial direction in which to start focusing to and CDAF (contrast detecting) system takes care of the rest. I would still guess that both, PDAF on sensor and focus peaking, will be seen in future Olympus bodies, although this was not said explicitly.

(Another short term solution - while not actually discussed here - with the same basic aim would be a Sony style lens adapter with traditional PDAF elements. It also has limitations like e.g. in Sony's case the PDAF sensors, because of the size of adapter, are smaller, less sensitive and accurate, than the sensors Sony has inside camera bodies. Also this kind of adapter must have a fixed mirror which takes away one third of light from sensor.)

To support a real professional OM-D system, a pro service network is needed. That's something which is not cheap to set up. For a plain "pro" features body such service is, of course, not needed. Among features discussed was ETTR, exposure to the right.  I would like to see a system based on the actual and native ETTR exposure information directly from sensor or raw file, instead of what now is possible only by using demosaiced "jpeg" values and lots of menu tweaking. Technically there is nothing preventing such a system, and Mr. Terada wrote many things down in his notebook. I also understood that showing live view exposure warnings before exposure is an Olympus patent, which would mean that Olympus has monopoly to the most accurate exposure indication there is. Another feature discussed was tethered shooting and camera control from computer. Mr. Terada was aware of the importance of this feature in studio photography. We went on discussing video features and the lack of IBIS while shooting video with 3rd party lenses. He explained it by the problem of camera not knowing the real focal length especially with 3rd party zoom lenses. I saw the responsibility being on the user just like it is in still photography and wished for firmware update. Again, also this was written into his notebook. The possibility of using DNG format as a pro raw format was also discussed among other smaller details.

Regarding lenses, I expressed the wish of many users to have more black lenses. Mr. Terada told that silver lenses (with no weather sealing) come from PEN design and they are the first option for general photography now. I was surprised and confused with this reasoning and still am as "silver" OM-D has different gray finish from PEN silver. Is the silver 75mm f/1.8 lens meant for PEN and not for OM-D? And how about the 45mm lens with cheaper finish which matches better OM-D? As a matter of fact he was surprised that I am not at all distracted by the difference in shades between my silver OM-D and the 12mm f2.0 lens. I found all of this strange, and somehow I was not able to understand his logic nor express my confusion to him. Anyway, according to Mr. Terada, there are no product categories based on image quality among Olympus mFT lenses. Well, I'm fine with the upcoming new 17mm lens having PEN silver finish and no weather sealing, as long as it is as good as a moderate wide angle as 75mm f/1.8 is as a short tele. Again, like  others before him, Mr. Terada was promising high image quality for the new 17mm lens. About future lenses, there is no roadmap for lenses available to be published.

One hour, that's the time Mr. Terada had for me. It went too fast and I'm not going to list here every little detail mentioned. I had asked previously my readers to send me questions. There was too many topics to be discussed with Mr. Terada but Olympus has promised to read every question and comment.

As the last thing, I asked Mr. Terada what would a single OM-D cost if modified into a dedicated monochrome body. It would be expensive he said, and from my offers of 2000 or 20000 euros he chose the latter with laughter.  It is not just about taking Bayer filter off. Everything regarding image (including exposure and focusing) should be re-done and programmed and he was not too sure about the suitability of this particular sensor either. With smiles we parted while sharing my silly idea of a monochrome technology demonstrator of OM-D - just for the fun of it.

-p-

Sigma 30 mm f/2.8 EX DN

The new Sigma 30 mm lens is a well balanced addition for mFT bodies. It is no pancake but its 39 mm length keeps your camera compact. Also its weight is mere 135g. The balance is good for instance with E-P3 body above. All comments in this blog are based on this combination.  

A 30 mm mFT lens corresponds to 60 mm angle of view in full format 35mm. This is a rare angle of view in prime lenses, but on the other hand it would fix the gap for me between 20 mm Lumix and 45 mm M.Zuiko lenses. Physical size would be similar, too. This lens is also available for APS-C size mirrorless cameras. There actual angle of view corresponds to normal focal length. Sigma 30 mm lens has a telecentric optical construction with 7 glass lenses in 5 groups. Two of these lenses are moulded aspherical and one of these has aspherical surface on both sides. The closest focusing distance is 30 cm.

This lens is sold in Europe for under 200 euros, which did not make me to expect for top quality mechanically or optically. My test sample showed some rattling when shaken, which comes (obviously?) from diaphragm blades. This is normal for this lens as I have heard similar comments from others. Diaphragm rattles also while metering light in some circumstances. I did not notice any adverse side effect (like inconsistence in exposures) from these phenomena in images. Internal autofocusing is fast, markedly faster than, say, Lumix 20 mm f/1.7 lens AF. It is not as fast as latest M.Zuikos, though. Focusing is quiet,  if not totally silent. This lens has a linear AF motor just like other latest internally focusing mFT lenses. Linear motor needs less moving parts and helps in quietness. Mechanically the most negative thing for me is focusing ring which jerks when you try to make small focusing adjustments. Focusing ring turns okay in constant move but starting without a jerk is difficult or impossible. Focusing ring is also obviously too thin as pressing fingers makes it lock up. In my opinion this lens should be taken as an AF only lens. During AF operation focusing ring is switched off and has no effect.   

Sigma´s 30 mm lens communicates slowly with camera body when turning camera power on.  It takes longer to get camera ready for the first shot than normally with mFT lenses. 

Test target

I shot my standard test target at apertures from F2.8 to F8. The results were a very positive surprise!

Image center is very good already wide open at F2.8 and reaches its top at F5.6. Edges lag behind at every f-stop, but differencies are not too big to show in normal images except for maybe F2.8 which is not actually bad. I have used Lightroom 4 automatic feature to correct chromatic aberration from these test shots, just like I would do in normal images. Chromatic aberration is not strong and it is removed effectively.

Image Samples and Conclusion

Images below were shot as RAW files with Olympus E-P3 and they were opened into Lightroom 4 and saved as sRGB JPEGs from there. I have done my standard procedure: removed chromatic aberration with LR4 automatic feature, checked and adjusted white balance and tonal range in LR4 Basic window and added slight sharpening in LR4 Detail window. Crops are all 100%.

I think Sigma has produced here a lens, which is optically significantly better than I expected. It gives much compared to its price and is definitely worth considering if this focal lenght is otherwise interesting.

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F2.8 @ ISO 200, 1/1000s.  Nice image quality already wide open. Slight coloring in strong contrast edges might be as much from Lightroom as from lens. 

F2.8 @ ISO 320, 1/80s. Hair detail should be examined while remembering how flat this light is.

F2.8 @ ISO 400, 1/60s.

F2.8 @ ISO 1250, 1/80s.

F2.8. Bokeh - rendering of out of focus areas - depends on contrast of lighting and relative distances between focusing point and background. Diaphgram has seven curved blades, which gives beautiful, almost round out of focus spheres.

F5.6 @ ISO 200, 1/125s. This lens tolerates back light quite well. You can get flare and reddish edges like here, if sky is lighter than everything else by several stops. Generally bright spots are no problem.

F5.6 @ ISO 200, 1/60s.

F5.0 @ IS0 200, 1/500s.