A friend loaned me the Olympus holy trinity, the f1.2 17, 25 and 45 lenses.
Reluctant to try them to be honest.
I loaned him my “fast” Sigma 30 f1.4, my low light champion, a lens I do not use much as I dislike its habit of flattening the subject with its in fashion sharp-soft look.
At 30mm this lens can look more compressed than my 75, which can be fine sometimes.
My obvious comparison point, and I will do a better job of this later, is with my trinity of S-Prime Panasonic lenses.
Now to be fair, the Old lenses are weatherproof, considerably faster, metal, have a very nice manual focus clutch, are as sharp as a vipers fang and surprisingly compact, but they are dearer than the S-Primes and the format I feel balances out the depth of field difference at their maximum of f1.8.
The 45 wide open vs the 85 wide open. Every effort was spared to be consistent….. obviously.
The Panasonic is on the right.
Takeways were;
The Pana made me back off a bit, a full frame thing and the 85 has a longer close focus distance. The whole thing feels clumsier to be honest.
The Oly was faster and more accurate to focus, but I will admit that S5II is not set up for action like the EM1x.
I prefer the colour and brightness of the Oly combo in three of the images, but that is also camera based.
The Pana seems to hold better highlight detail in the bench shot, but again, no consistency of process (or processing), see below for more.
I think the head shot is a wash due to different focus distance.
Full frame at f1.8 seems shallower than f1.2 in MFT (for better or worse), even with a less impressive close focus distance and when I was fair to both.
The Bokeh quality, a priority of the Oly glass, seems to be just fine on the Panas.
After a bit of processing (the left image got more, mainly highlight recovery), the pair are hard to split for detail. Pana lens is on the right.
It is sobering to remember the difference in formats.