A friend James loaned me the Olympus holy trinity, the f1.2 17, 25 and 45 lenses. He is a relatively recent convert to MFT coming from Sony.
Our journeys are different, his a serious hobby, mine is purely making a living these days (evinced by me gifting him my A3+ fine art printer and 400 sheets of fine art paper, a hobbyists thing needing an enthusiastic passion, just more work for me).
He came from Canon to Sony via Fuji and some others, picking up a OM-1 very right and seeing the light. His collection of lenses is impressive.
My journey also started with Canon (MF, AF and digital), some Oly MF, then most early digital mirrorless (Fuji, Sony, MFT). I settled on Oly early days as it was basically the only workable system at the time, skinny as it was. I re-entered full frame with Panasonic mostly because of video, but it sees occasional use for stills.
I was reluctant to try them to be honest, because I know they are exceptional, format myth busting actually, but I cannot afford or justify them.
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. Not a fair trade, but it is what it is (we have most other MFT lenses in common).
At a quite short 30mm, this lens can look more compressed than my 75. This can be fine sometimes, but something I am becoming less keen on.
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 Oly lenses are weatherproof, considerably faster in most respects, all 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 (I do feel the S-Primes are still a little over priced) and the format should balance out the depth of field difference at their maximum of f1.8.
The 45 wide open vs the 85 at same. Every effort was spared to be consistent….. obviously.
The Panasonic is on the right.
Takeways were;
The Pana made me back off a bit, maybe a full frame thing and the 85 does have a longer minimum focus distance. The whole thing feels clumsier to be honest.
The Oly was faster and more accurate to focus, but I will admit that the S5II is not set up for action like the EM1x. It is very much a matter of a specialist camera I am very familiar with compared to a less sure footed hybrid camera relatively new to me.
I prefer the colour and brightness of the Oly combo in three of the images, but that is also possibly 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 the different focus distance used, the Pana was closer and it shows.
The Oly lens seems to retain some three dimensionality, the Pana is flatter. This is tough to measure as the lens is magnifying the subject by the same amount but is using a shorter focal length to do it. Not sure what that actually means.
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.
The Oly lens and camera combo seemed to produce more consistent results, but they could be camera set up, the slight depth of field advantage and possibly better close up performance, the statue images being the most obvious.
The Pana combo looks biased towards yellow/blue, the Oly leans magenta/green.
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. The Pana seems to hold more high end detail, but on closer inspection it is a mixed result.
It is sobering to remember the difference in formats.