2250 - Wide Boy

It was pretty easy to guess, right? Well, one more gap in my equipment closed 🙂

You really can’t say I plunged into that Micro Four Thirds business. I tried it tentatively with the E-P2 and its humble 17/2.8 pancake lens, but as soon as I found I liked the system, I began to buy the cheap but good stuff, the two Panasonic pancakes, the 45/1.8 and the very capable plastic wonder, the Olympus 40-150 f4.0-5.6 R.

At that time I already put the 17/2.8 away, as I knew I would sell it with the E-P2. I had already seen Robin Wong’s review of the OM-D (beginning here) and I was hooked.

The OM-D turned out to be everything I had hoped for, and then some. It was clear that I wouldn’t ever go back to DSLRs, but as always it took me some time to realize it and then to follow the voice of reason.

I finally sold the E-P2 in early August, and in September I began to sell my Nikon Equipment. The proceeds I immediately invested in top Micro Four Thirds glass.

Currently I have the Sigma 8-16 for sale on eBay, and while shallow DOF is pretty much covered with the Panaleica 25/1.4, the 45/1.8 and of course the 75/1.8, while even macro is covered, at the wide and the long end there were significant gaps. The 12/2.0 is a fine, beautifully crafted lens, but from the Sigma 8-16 I am used to having an ultra-crazy-wide lens available, and that was severely missing.

Yesterday I got the Panasonic 7-14/4.0. It is not as wide as the Sigma 8-16 on APS-C (equivalent to 12 mm!), but an equivalent focal range of 14-28 mm is still impossibly wide.

So far I am very satisfied, except for one thing: at 7 mm the autofocus is pretty bad in low light. We’ll see how the lens does after a firmware update tonight. Optically it’s top notch anyway, at least as good as the Sigma and that already means a lot.

The Song of the Day is “Wide Boy” from a great a-capella album that was not available for a long time: The Flying Pickets and their 1982 album “Lost Boys”. Hear it on YouTube.