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 Amazon and, of course, eBay. When they were readily available I ordered a black lens and at the time you could also purchase white, red and silver versions that I’m sure that some stylish photographers can find by poking around on eBay.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Is this the worst Micro Four-thirds lens? The short answer is that it’s a darn good lens for the price. I was surprised how thin it is; It’s even thinner than Olympus’s 9mm lens cap lens ($99) that measures a half-inch thick. Yet I’ve tested more expensive camera lenses that were not as good optically. Sure there’s lots of plastic used in its construction and it’s a fixed aperture lens but….
Like the 9mm Olympus lens, you’ll have to manually focus the 15mm f/8 and the lens’s biggest failing is that it’s a manual focus lens. Olympus did place a tiny distance scale on it, but nevertheless 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 move accidentally and ending up with 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 or Lightroom and, what the heck, it might not even bother you.
How I made the above photograph: The camera that I used to photograph these Holiday-themed Porsche 911’s was an Olympus E-P3 and the 15mm f/8 body cap lens and 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. But for what I paid for it—fifty bucks— the Olympus 15mm f/8 lens should work great for what I intended to use it, which was at car shows with the more-or-less pocketable Olympus Pen E-P3. I keep that lens and both the E-P3 and 9mm lens in a compact Olympus-badged bag that I picked up at a trade show, back when they used to have have photo trade shows.
What have we learned today?
There are really several possibilities why the Olympus 15mm f/8 is not as bad as what you 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, fixed the problems sometime along the way and the final version 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 and it’s not such a bad lens after all.
All three possibilities prove one thing and that’s you can’t always trust what you read on the Internet (Including this blog.)
PS. An alternative might 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 $59 and it just jumped onto my radar. If I can save up enough pennies in my piggy bank to buy it or someone will loan me one to test I’ll do a review real soon now.
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