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Image Quality: Sharpness and color
The Olympus 17mm f/1.8 is a sharp lens, but not a brilliant lens. It seems to perform its best at close to medium focus distances, in the range where you’d be doing environmental portraiture or the like. Here, I find the lens gives a great rendering with good sharpness at the focus point throughout the majority of the frame, right from wide open. At greater focus distances and landscape type work, it’s good, but not great. Center sharpness is good, but even stopped down, there is some softening at the edges. It’s not bad, but I’ve seen better.
At closest focus, it also suffers from some softness at wider apertures. It really seems that Olympus focused on optimizing the lens for ‘street’ shooting, and for that range, it’s really a great lens when coupled with the fast autofocus.
The Olympus 17mm f/1.8 renders scenes in a pretty neutral way, with good contrast and natural color. There’s no big ‘pop’, but it lends itself well to environmental portrait work due to even skin tone rendering and neutral color palette.
Bokeh
As can be seen in the image above, bokeh on the 17mm f/1.8 is pretty nice. Specular highlights are neutral with only the slightest hint of a ring, and the general rendering is smooth and pleasing. This is the case on closer shots such as that photo.
However, when shooting more distant subjects, the bokeh changes considerably, mainly due to the presence of some longitudinal chromatic aberration. Due to the wider focal length, shots taken at wide apertures at longer distances really don’t show a lot of blur, and when backgrounds are busy, this results in a very nervous appearance to the bokeh. It can be a little distracting. See the image below for an example:
Chromatic Aberration, Flare and Distortion
The Olympus 17mm f/1.8 performs OK with regards to chromatic aberration. There is visible lateral CA at all apertures, though nowhere near the level of its slower f/2.8 sibling. Luckily, this can be easily corrected with software without much trouble. As noted above, there can be some longitudinal CA as well, though it’s really only distracting in certain cases, such as the shot above. For most work, especially at closer ranges, it isn’t an issue.
I didn’t have an opportunity to test flare with regards to direct sunlight, since in the week I had the lens for review, we literally had zero visible sunlight in central Ohio for the entirety of that week. I did not notice any visible flaring with natural light sources, and it seemed to control flare quite well in everyday use.
Distortion on JPEGs or with RAW converters such as Lightroom/ACR that read the lens distortion metadata is very low. However, there is a lot of camera/converter correction being applied, which may account for some of the softer corners. When using a RAW converter such as Capture One Pro 7, that doesn’t read the distortion correction metadata, distortion is outrageously high, though corner resolution is improved. See the two images below. These are the same image, converted from the same RAW file. The Capture One Pro conversion (without distortion correction) is on the left, while the Lightroom conversion (with correction) is on the right. Wow.
Jordan,
Thank you for the review. Very helpful. I’m looking for a 35mm equivalent lens for either my OM-D or X-E1 and you’ve now convinced me to wait for the Fujinon 23mm 1.4 to make its eventual appearance.
While this lens sounds good for some uses, I’d also prefer it be good at landscapes too.
So, it’s merely good (not great) but since it’s not as expensive as other micro Four-Thirds lenses, it’s a relative bargain?
I may have missed the part about whether it is sealed for weather and dust but I had always assumed that it was not.
Maybe, Olympus’ next iteration at 17mm will actually be great, weather-sealed, and remain at the same price.
I paid the equivalent of US $490 for my one, and at that price it is not a bargain. Not many m43 primes are more expensive – only the 12/2.0, 45/2.8 Macro and 75/1.8 that I can think of.
It is not weathersealed.
The clutch-focus system is pretty useless – something that this reviewer has not mentioned.
However, I still like the lens a lot. My one is plenty sharp in the centre and is screamingly fast to autofocus. Corner sharpness is pretty good when stopped down to f8.
That makes me sad. I hope you don’t feel cheated.
I took the leap to micro Four-Thirds a few weeks ago but I’m really uncomfortable with the choices and I ended up buying the Olympus MMF-3 adapter to compensate, so that I can use my Four-Thirds lenses. I need to be able to shoot in the rain and after photographing out in three hurricanes with Olympus equipment and no trouble, I need to remind myself not to take my Four-Thirds mount Leica/Panasonic 25mm f/1.4 out in the rain.
I hope Olympus (and Panasonic) come to their senses and treat more than the hobbyists.
I find the manual focusing system to be quite excellent. Feels almost like a legacy manual focus lens. What is not as useful is the DOF scale. It is rather vague and imprecise. They should have put more numbers in the “near” end of the scale.
I am confused with the DOF scale it is way to pessimistic!
If I compare it with the DOF calculator.
set to 3 meter it is sharp (circle of Confusion for Mft = 0.015mm) from inf to 1.35 meter at aperture 8
But according the lens scale i need aperture 22 🙂
I am confused with the DOF scale it is way to pessimistic!
If I compare it with the DOF calculator.
set to 3 meter it is sharp (circle of Confusion for Mft = 0.015mm) from inf to 1.35 meter at aperture 8
But according the lens scale i need aperture 22 🙂
Kind regards Gert Jan newbe in MFT
This 17mm f/1.8 is a big disappointment if you ask me. Way too expensive for what you get. Merely good image quality. The Panasonic 20mm is mulch sharper and contrastier then this dud. The only thing it has going for it, is it’s focus speed. But I wouldn’t pay premium for that alone. Maybe if the price becomes more realistic (about 300 dollars) I would consider it. For now, I just hold on to my beloved Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake. Smaller, cheaper, and optically noticeably better.
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