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Favourite m43 lens
  • So Which One Do You Find Your Self Using The Most. I Find Myself Personally Using the 14-140 Only For Its Wide Variety Of Lengths And Heavy Weight compared to the smaller primes For My Glidecam. However i dont really like the quality of the 14-140 nearly as much as the primes. Which lens is your favorite? and WHY?

  • 8 Replies sorted by
  • (Your style of capitalization doesn't make it easy to read your posting.) Simple answer: non-electronic MFT lenses because (a) they are the only ones providing proper focus and aperture rings, indispensable for video shooting, (b) they don't rely on software correction of distorted optics.

    That rules out all Panasonic and Olympus lenses - almost all of which produce sub-par images when you look at their unprocessed raw camera stills with software like Raw Therapee. On top of that, they often cost twice as much as comparable SLR lenses with the equivalent focal range.

    And leaves Voigtlander, SLR Magic and now also Kowa. Those are also the only native MFT lenses that produce no major distortions on Blackmagic cameras. (But really the best solution IMHO are Nikon lenses in combination with the Nikon-to-MFT Speedbooster, despite what you wrote about no adapters.)

  • @cantsin I'm thinking of going that route for my lenses: get a Speed Booster and use Nikon lenses. Nikon lenses are terrific, there are lots of them (making used ones cheap), and most are mechanical manual-focus, which'd work great with my follow-focus rig.

    Thing is, I'd have to get a Speed Booster first, and then start getting Nikon glass. Most of the reviews and comparisons using the Speed Booster note a very slight amount of distortion around the edges. So I'm curious as to how this compares with using a native MFT lens like SLR Magic's line .

    Do you have any comparisons between using native MFT lenses like the SLR Magic lenses against their Niko-and-Speed Booster counterparts? (Also, how much field of veiw does one lose when using Nikon lenses on MFT cameras?)

  • I only have 3 lenses so far (both Lumix X Zooms plus Oly 45) and, therefore, I have used the 3 of them extensively depending on needs or circumstances.

    Each of them is great for certain topics: 12-35 is a very good and reliable landscape/street/walkaround lens, 45 is terrific for portraiture and video, and 35-100 is a combination of both, very flexible to shoot general and isolated subjects.

    I have plenty of images captured with those 3 lenses in my blog. You can see my latest set, all captured with the 35-100 X Zoom, in Bangkok's biggest and "rawest" fresh market, here:

    http://gonzalobroto.blogspot.com/2014/02/khlong-toei-market-all-things-flesh.html

  • Olympus 75mm. I call it my "good luck charm". Solid construction, premium optics, fast & reliable AF. Highly recommended. Can't wait for the Panasonic 42.5mm!!!

  • Panasonic 35-100 2.8 for sure.

  • @Brian_Siano I find the color rendition and contrast of Nikon lenses (with or without Speed Booster, doesn't matter) way more pleasant than the greenish colors and harsh contrasts of lenses like the SLR Magic 12mm. No problems with distortion here, but I'm only using the vanilla 0.71 MFT Speed Booster.

  • @cantsin Thanks for the word. Looks like I'll be getting a Metabones Speed Booster and I'll be haunting the used Nikon lens sites. (Only down side is that wide-angle lenses might ave to be native MFT.) Any samples of your work on the Web that I can look at?

  • @Brian_Siano With Speedbooster and BMPC, only one that is extremely graded:

    If there's anything remarkable about it, then the fact that it was all shot with available light in a dim club at night. 80% of the shot were down with a speedboosted Sigma 30mm/1.4, the remaining 20% with a speedboosted Nikon 50mm/1.2 (exterior shots) and an adapted Fujinon 12.5mm c-mount lens.