[Leica] M Lenses on GF-1

[rmcclure2 at woh.rr.com (rob mcclure)]

Henning, Have you (or anyone else on here) had experience with the  
Panny micro 45-200?  Wondering about its image quality, effective  
speed with IS, build quality, etc. Also, I agree with you about the  
kit zoom.  It is a great little lens -- excellent image quality and it  
feels like quality goods.

Rob


On Apr 13, 2010, at 6:42 PM, Henning Wulff wrote:

> Dave, I mostly use the Panasonic m4/3 lenses, as their convenience  
> and generally excellent quality make using something else a special  
> purpose thing. Like the 75 Summilux.
>
> The 'kit' zoom that comes with the G1 or GF-1 is excellent and tiny.  
> It's easily the best standard range zoom I've used from any  
> manufacturer, and its only real downside is that it's slow.
>
> Since non-Panasonic wideangle lenses don't work as well as the  
> Panasonic lenses on the m4/3 cameras, and the non-Panasonic  
> wideangles don't offer any real speed advantages (I'm talking about  
> wideangle in the m4/3 sense, so 20mm and less) there seems little  
> point in using anything else.
>
> I haven't used the 45 macro, but while the tests haven't been bad,  
> the results haven't been outstanding either. The price is too high  
> to get it unless it's outstanding and you don't have anything else  
> that's useable. Reversing the 14-45 is the easiest and cheapest way  
> to go macro, and the non-Panasonic lens that I use most on the m4/3  
> format is the old manual focus 200/4 micro-Nikkor. I also use the  
> 400/6.8 Telyt more than I would have thought. So - other than  
> Panasonic, the most used lenses in order of use are: 200/4 micro- 
> Nikkor, 50/1.4 ASPH, 400/6.8, and then various other lenses such as  
> the 75/1.4, 50/1, 35/1.4 and a whole range of macro things and  
> lenses from other makes.
>
> The Panasonic lenses all get 'corrected' by in camera software. This  
> allows lenses like the 7-14 to have virtually no distortion, no CA  
> and be extremely sharp, light, small and (relatively) inexpensive.  
> In camera correction allows the designers to concentrate on the  
> aspects that can't be fixed in software, such as astigmatism,  
> spherical aberration etc and let the distortion and CA fall where it  
> may. There's no downside in use to my eyes. Like I said, I hope the  
> Olympus collapsible 9-18 is as good, because that would open up  
> wideangle shooting to a lot more people
>