43 Rumors

Hello

That sounds too good to be true . A 2.8/12mm if good would have me buy into the M4/3 rds just for that lens
a 20mm could be good IF that offers distinctive advantage over the panny : better coorection for vignetting, possibility to have a lens hood , optional OVF

and also PLEASE olympus , you need to make REAL lenses for the m4/3 , meaning give us distance engravings on the lenses ( at least for the fixed focal lenses) so that one can work with the hyperfocal distance which should be a given on a camera of that format
Harold

I’d be looking forward to the 12mm f2.8. Sounds great and a lot nice than the 14mm from Panasonic, but still, why copy the 20mm? Why not *improve*?

14mm is becoming a most boring focal length in the 4/3 & m4/3 systems, a very large number of lenses that starts at that FL compared to lenses that stat wider. oly4/3: 14-42, 14-45, 14-54 I & II, 14-35 Pana4/3, 14-50f2.8, 14-50f3.x,14-150. Panam4/3:14-54, 14-140, 14. Olym4/3 14-42,14-150. compared to only two 7-14, two 9-18, 11-22,12-60, (rumored 12), add 2 or 3 fisheyes if consider these ‘true’ WA lenses. in total 12 lenses starting @ 14mm versus only 6 serious lenses that starts anything wider than 14.
In full frame and APS systems it is not like that, you can choose between 24 or 28mm in FF or 16,17,18mm among APS-C.
important to note here that 14mm is equiv. to 28mm of 35mmFF in case you compare diagonal to diagonal, we don’t frame our shot specially WA shots based on the diagonal, if you compare width to width 14mm is equiv to 29.1mm, IOW 14mm has the same field of view of 35mmFF just with an extra stripes on the top and the bottom. and in wide angle photography 90% of the time the extra stripes at the top and bottom are of no importance, take dcresource.com’s nighshot as example, does it really matter to crop from the top & bottom even to something more panoramic than 3:2?!

Catastrophile, you don’t loose the field of view on GH1 – it has larger sensor with 3:2 and even 16:9 ratios. I hope Olympus will use similar sensor in the future but it’s not likely, Panasonic probably wants to keep to himself.

That’s a sad bit of rumor. Could they produce slower lens that are even smaller? The whole point of the smaller sensor was to produce faster, smaller and optically cleaner lenses. Even 7-14 f4.0 makes no sense when fullframe cameras have that same zoom at f2.8. Maybe MFT is destined to be mom’s sophisticated point and shoot…. I guess the future rests with Panasonic.

While I think fast pancake primes are where the real action is, Olympus doing a new 20mm f/1.7 for release in a years time doesn’t make sense to me. Anyone who wants one would have got the Panasonic long before then, and they’ll fight for market share after that. It would be better if they put resources into new lenses that are currently not covered. The other thought is could it be a rebrand of the Panasonic, but that wouldn’t need to take a year to do.