The Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens is the standard kit lens provided with many OM System micro four-thirds cameras. You can't really fault this lens given that it's mostly sold as part of a kit, but even if you do decide to buy it separately, it's incredibly good value for money. I used it alongside the Zuiko 12-60 for a couple of months and while that lens is certainly in a different league, the IQ difference isn't as dramatic as you might expect. This lens is perfectly capable of producing great shots. Olympus has enjoyed creating a lens that retracts into itself to become further compact, but has struggled to create something that's easy for the casual shooter to use. Previous designs require the user to turn the zoom ring to extend the body of the lens so it's ready to use, accompanied by a helpful text on the camera body. Olympus has taken it a step further, by turning this into an automatic power function: now the lens extends just by turning on the camera. This has the added benefit of giving the lens a power zoom function, which is useful in movie creation. This lens was the original kit lens for the Evolt E-330, which has arguably been replaced by the 14-42mm Zuiko. Corner softness is a problem with this lens, obvious at wide angles and apertures; chromatic aberration is also readily apparent until you zoom out further than 18mm. Vignetting and distortion are also worse, but not by much.

Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R Lens Review

The biggest selling point of the 14-42mm EZ pancake is, of course, its ridiculously small form factor. For this reason it has been the kit lens typically sold with smaller Olympus camera bodies like the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV, Olympus PEN E-PL10 and Olympus PEN E-P7. The AF motor is very weak and cannot handle the load of a filter and lens hood combined. Nor can it take a Cokin P series filter holder and in any event, the rotating front element and inability to retain focus when changing filters makes this lens close to useless for ND filters etc. Here is couple test shots with CPL filter (and forgot to have high contrast values dialed in, making things uber strong) and denoised (all noise removed, >99% details preserved). The new version of the 14-42mm M.Zuiko has dramatically improved its tolerance to chromatic aberration, specifically at the wide end (14mm), where it was most noticeable. It's still there if you look for it - magenta-blue fringing on the edges of high-contrast areas - but it's very slight indeed.The collapsing lens is a little strange, but it does make the camea smaller and easier to put in the bag. When collapsed smaller than the Panasonic G1 kit lens. I liked the optics well enough, although there were sometimes purple fringes in contrasty lighting> Curiously, macro performance has taken a bit of a hit compared to the previous model - just 0.19x magnification instead of the previous 0.24x magnification. Minimum close-focusing distance is unchanged at 25cm (just under a foot). Corner softness makes stitching panoramas a little smeary, and it's one of my favorite things to do that I print large, so I don't use the pancake EZ for that.

Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 II R Review | PCMag

There is a little bit of corner shading for the Olympus 14-42mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 ED EZ: the extreme corners are about a half-stop darker than the center when the lens is used at its widest aperture. At any setting, this shading is reduced and it's basically negligible. Or like a new father and mother, when a baby crows 5mm every week in the first months, learns to emotionally communicate with the parents, learns to make jokes and observations etc. There is no time to wait a "perfect camera" or any reasons to spend money to "best lens" or "best body" because none of those matters.Get the latest photography news straight to your inbox by signing up to our newsletter. Newsletter Signup In the mid-range (18-35mm) results are somewhat similar. At the widest end of the lens' performance (ƒ/3.9-5.2) the lens produces a small central portion of sharpness, degrading to softness in one corner or another; these results suggest some light de-centering with our sample of this lens. At 18mm and 25mm, stopping down to ƒ/5.6 removes this softness significantly, while at 35mm you need to stop down to ƒ/8 to get the sharpest results at that focal length.

Olympus Pen 14-42mm MKI vs 14-42mm MKII | ePHOTOzine Olympus Pen 14-42mm MKI vs 14-42mm MKII | ePHOTOzine

Featuring an all plastic design, this is definitely a consumer grade lens, but can produce sharp, pro quality results if used correctly in the right situations. Above ƒ/8, diffraction limiting begins to affect the image sharpness, but only marginally - it's only by ƒ/11 - ƒ/16 that we note significant softening. The minimum aperture of ƒ/22 is best avoided, with very soft results at either wide angle (14mm) or telephoto (35-42mm). At 18mm or 25mm, image sharpness is surprisingly good for ƒ/22, though. Smallest 3x zoom with 14-42mm focal length (especially 42mm end is important for landscape and portraiture) It captures very respectable images, and very much comes into its own as a video lens, since the fully motorized zoom can smoothly and near-silently push in and out of your scene to record more dynamic footage. That electronic zoom also means that you can fully control the focal length from your phone when shooting remotely! The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple.Also from the same position the older MkI lens gives a fractionally wider angle of view - see the photos below where they were taken from the same tripod mounted spot. Olympus 14-42mm Mk I Compared to the Zuiko pro lenses, build quality isn't great but a more fair comparison is to other manufacturers' kit lenses and then it certainly stands up well, with only Pentax' 18-55 II being noticeably better. The lens hood is quite good and the front element doesn't rotate so polarizers are perfectly useable. The colour rendition is spot on, and Olympus cameras do produce particularly pleasing JPEGs – though if you look at them up close you'll see that the sharpening is pretty crude and leaves some obvious edge halos. Keen photographers would be better off shooting raw files.

There are 2 different Olympus 14-42mm lenses - Mu-43 There are 2 different Olympus 14-42mm lenses - Mu-43

If you already have an OM-D E-M10 Mark II then there’s no point in upgrading to the Mark III unless 4K video is a priority, but if you have the original E-M10 Mark I and you love it, then you should take a close look at the E-M10 Mark III because it’s practically a new camera. As focusing is performed internally the 37mm filter thread does not rotate, which makes this lens ideal for use with graduated and polarising filters. There is a slim manual focus ring at the front of the lens barrel, which makes manual focusing possible. The minimum focus distance is 20cm, which makes this lens suitable for shooting in tight spaces or for the occasional close up.While size isn't the only thing that the Olympus M.Zuiko 14‑42mm f/3.5‑5.6 EZ has going for it, it's a pretty big deal. Well, a pretty small one. But there are plenty of reasons why this is the best pancake lens on the market –and why it has been included as a kit lens for years with the best Olympus cameras (OM System). How do you like your carrots? Now with 15 different Art Filters, the OM-D E-M10 Mark III offers a lot of potential for creative expression Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc. In the Olympus M.ZUIKO Digital ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 EZ, Olympus employed a five-bladed circular diaphragm, which isn't usually conductive to a pleasant bokeh, but in actuality the results aren't too bad at all for a kit lens. Olympus PEN E-P7 + Olympus M.Zuiko 14‑42mm f/3.5‑5.6 EZ (1/40 sec, ISO200, f/5.6) (Image credit: James Artaius) Olympus M.Zuiko 14‑42mm f/3.5‑5.6 EZ: Verdict