Today’s Post by Joe Farace
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.—William Shakespeare
I’ve always been intrigued by the Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens that someone, whose opinion I respect, once told me, “That lens is truly worthless.” The lens is seemingly discontinued but you can still get them from all the used camera gear sources including, of course, eBay, where they are selling for more than when they were new!. When they were available new/ I ordered a black lens and at the time you could also purchase white, red and silver versions that, I’m sure, some more stylish photographers can find by poking around on eBay.
The elephant in the room
Is this the worst Micro Four-thirds lens ever made? The short answer is No!. I think it’s a darn good lens for the price. I’ve tested more expensive camera lenses that were not as good optically. I was surprised how thin it is; It’s even thinner than Olympus’s 9mm lens cap lens ($94) that measures a half-inch thick. Sure there’s lots of plastic in its construction and it’s a fixed aperture lens but….
How I made the above photograph: The camera I used to photograph these Holiday-themed Porsche 911’s was an Olympus Pen E-P3 and a 15mm f/8 body cap lens with an exposure of 1/640 sec at f/8 and ISO 640. It was shot using a 16:9 ratio format that probably minimized any distortion. For what I paid for it—fifty bucks— the Olympus 15mm f/8 lens should work great for how I intended to use it, which was at car shows with that more-or-less pocketable Olympus Pen. I keep that lens and the E-P3 along with a 9mm lens cap lens in a compact Olympus-badged camera bag that I picked up at a trade show, back when they used to have have photo trade shows.
Like the 9mm Olympus lens, you’ll have to manually focus the 15mm f/8 and the lens’s biggest failing is not that it’s a manual focus lens but its lackluster focusing mechanism. Olympus placed a tiny distance scale on it but some guesswork is required. When shooting, you may discover that some of your images are in focus and others are not but it’s not the optic’s fault, it’s just that you’re focused in the wrong place. If you take the time to look at the image on the camera’s LCD screen, you should be able to see any focus problems. I’ll readily admit to sometimes missing focus and the focusing lever is easy to accidentally move producing a soft photograph. Because it’s a 15mm lens there is also some barrel distortion when you tilt the lens up or down but you can correct it in Photoshop and, what the heck, it might not even bother you.
What have we learned today?
There are several possibilities why the Olympus 15mm f/8 is not as bad as what you’ve been led to believe by others. They are:
- DxO gave it a “poor” rating but maybe they were wrong. All of you who have lost arguments about gear at the camera club with your opponent quoting DxO stats will probably prefer that answer.
There’s the possibility that Olympus, who introduced the lens in 2013, somewhere along the way fixed the problems and the version being sold by OM Systems was pretty good.- For a lens that originally cost $50, the current asking prices range from $75 to $165, which tells me that some people agree with me that it’s not such a bad lens after all.
All these possibilities prove one thing and that’s you can’t always trust what you read on the Internet.
PS. An alternative might to this lens be the all-metal and manual focusing 7artisans Photoelectric 18mm f/6.3 UFO Lens for Micro Four Thirds. This quirky looking lens sells for $50 and just jumped onto my radar. If I can save up enough pennies in my piggy bank to buy one or someone will loan me one to test, I’ll do a review real soon now.
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