Just to throw in my uninformed opinion, my colleague (who is a 'sissy'
for
using a digital Olympus, especially after I switched from Canon EOS
digital
to Olympus OM and monochrome film :-) recently purchased a ZD 9-18 for
his wife (to mount on her E-500) and I had a chance to play with the
lens
a bit on his E-3.
There are two very differing aspects to this lens it seems: First of
all, the optical
quality seems really very nice, even if f/4 - f/5.6 is a bit slow for
any
lens in my opinion. An E-3 with a great viewfinder is already pretty
dim, it must be horrendous
on an E-500/510 etc - you have to use/trust AF, and low-light is near
impossible. It appears uniformly
sharp, great colours, very consistent - in good Olympus tradition.
What I was truly unimpressed with, was the build quality and handling.
It is so light as to feel
like a toy, the focusing is painfully slow and noisy (and since it's
focus-by-wire, even manual focusing
was so poor, I couldn't help laughing). So really, from a handling
point of view, feels like a toy / piece
of junk, actually worse than Canon's notoriously poor kit lenses like
the 18-55mm if you ask me. I would not
enjoy using the lens.
On the other hand, it seems capable of producing great images. So it
depends what your priorities are.
But really, it's physically not a nice piece of equipment in my opinion.
On 22 Nov 2008, at 2:54 AM, GMcGrath@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Just curious if anyone has used one of these yet. Thus far, my wide
> end
> stops at 14mm for my 510, and I'd like to go wider. Any comments now
> or in the
> near future about this lens would be appreciated.
--
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