Olympus Pen F Lens Performance Analysis

[Guillaume Zuili]

Having seen some Dario Moriyama mural prints shot with Pen cameras i can assure you that 11x14 is not the limit...
Fantastic little cameras !

 

[Cholentpot]

Having seen some Dario Moriyama mural prints shot with Pen cameras i can assure you that 11x14 is not the limit...
Fantastic little cameras !

Extremely capable cameras if I had to say so myself.

 

[r_a_feldman]

The 25mm f/4 has poor corner sharpness that I think has to do with flatness of field - I'd like to know if there's ever an aperture where the corners become okay. Can improve shots where only the central subject is important though.

Attached are three color images of a mowed grass field shot with my Olympus 25mm f4 on a 40MP Fujifilm X-E5. They have been processed in GIMP with the Edge Filter using a technique described in DP Review by Roger Cicala of Lensrentals that can give you a rapid idea of a lens' quality. The edge detect filter acts like focus peaking on a digital camera, so the whiter areas are in sharper focus.

As you can see, the lower corners are darker (less sharp) than the center at all three apertures. The corners are best at f16, but overall the image is not as bright (sharp) as at f8.

Also attached for comparison are images taken with the new Fujinon 23mm f2.8 WR kit lens wide open at f2.8. All images have been resized from 7728 x 5152 pixels to 1500 x 1000 pixels to bring the file size under the 2MB Photrio upload limit.

 

[loccdor]

Thank you @r_a_feldman ! I managed to finish a full roll of slide film with the new (to me) Pen FV and 25mm f/2.8 lens today. I'll develop it soon.

 

[alanrockwood]

Not surprising at all, in view of the fact that half-frame 8x10 requires twice the magnification of FF film to 8x10, and it has been widely accepted for decades that 16X magnification was pretty much the limit of acceptable results from FF film, particularly due to apparent grain.

Actually, half frame only requires about 1.4x more magnification than full frame to cover 8x10.

Theoretically it should be 1.333x more because half frame "should" be 18x24mm. However, the frame is closer to 17mm than 18mm on the short side, so it works out to be about 1.4x times more magnification than full frame.

However, half frame looses less of the image than does full frame when cropping to fit 8x10 because the aspect ratio of half frame is closer to 8x10 aspect ratio than is the aspect ratio of full frame.

 

[loccdor]

And to make things even more confusing, the lens factor is 1.44x