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. 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 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. There is no distance scale, depth-of-field scale or infrared index, or in fact any switches of readouts of any kind. The plastic filter threads take 37mm filters, and the body mount is metal. The lens mounts well on the OM-D E-M10, and is available in both matte black and silver finishes. It's less than an inch long in its retracted form, and only 93g (3.3 oz) in weight. The Olympus 14-42mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 ED EZ M.Zuiko is an plastic lens, and is the smallest Olympus has designed in this category: it's very aptly described as a pancake zoom lens. The lens isn't designed specifically for macro work, but it's not that bad: a minimum focusing distance of just under 10 inches (25cm), with a magnification ratio of 0.23x. The front element does not rotate when focusing, making life that much easier for polarizer users. The lens uses Olympus' MSC (Movie & Still Compatible) design, making it ideal for use in both still and video applications. The Olympus 14-42mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 ED EZ M.Zuiko is very fast to autofocus, taking less than a second to go through its entire focusing range.
At other focal lengths, we see some fairly noticeable barrel distortion, topping out at the 14mm mark. You can tell there is a bit of distortion correction going on under the hood in our test pictures, as it nicely scales to 0% at the 42mm setting. At any setting, this shading is reduced and it's basically negligible. 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. It's most easily noticed in the wide angle (14mm). To summarize, this lens is a good outdoor shooter, where there's a lot of light to comfortably shoot at ƒ/8 or smaller.Ĭhromatic aberration is noticeable in any photograph taken with this lens, appearing in the corners and areas of high contrast as magenta-green fringing.
The lens begins to exhibit diffraction limiting at ƒ/11, but it's not noticeably until ƒ/16 and ƒ/22. It benefits from being stopped down to ƒ/8, where it achieves a good result. The mid-range of the lens is where is shows its weakness - at 28mm, the lens isn't particularly sharp at its maximum aperture of ƒ/5 - it's pretty good, but not great. At the 14mm setting the lens exhibits some corner softness when set to ƒ/3.5, which is marginally better when stopped down through to ƒ/8.Īt the 42mm setting the lens is quite good, offering decent sharpness from corner to corner - it's made better by stopping down to ƒ/8 (at this focal length, your maximum aperture begins at ƒ/5.6), but again, it doesn't reach an especially sharp result. The Olympus 14-42mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 ED EZ is decently sharp when used wide open, but the best results for sharpness will only be seen when the lens is stopped down to ƒ/8, at any focal length. It is available now for around $400, or as part of the OM-D E-M10 Premium Kit option.
The lens takes 37mm filters, but no lens hood is available for it. It features a variable aperture design, so the widest aperture you have available changes as the lens is zoomed towards 42mm: Focal length The lens is designed to fit on micro four-thirds camera bodies such as those produced by Olympus and Panasonic, and the lens will work interchangeably on either system.