[Leica] M Lenses on GF-1

[drodgers at casefarms.com (David Rodgers)]

Henning,

I'm anxious to see what the Panasonic 14/2.8 looks like. I understand
it's due out sometime this year, though no official announcement yet.
That would go nicely with the 20/1.7. Then I could use my Leica M lenses
on the tele end. 

I looked into the 7-14. It's not cheap, but it sounds like a great lens.
The Micro Four Thirds format appears to be gaining popularity. No doubt
we'll see some interesting things, hopefully in terms of lenses. 

Dave R 

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+drodgers=casefarms.com at leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+drodgers=casefarms.com at leica-users.org] On Behalf Of
Henning Wulff
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 6:42 PM
To: Leica Users Group
Subject: Re: [Leica] M Lenses on GF-1

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