Digital Camera News and Reviews

Olympus Zuiko 70-300mm

Wrotinak is an infamous photographer in the Olympus community with his helpful guides on the Four Thirds system. When I bought the Olympus E-500 DSLR his guide about this camera helped me a lot.
This time Wrotinak have written a “user report” on the Olympus Zuiko 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 ED lens. I own this lens myself so I was pretty excited to see Wrotinak testing this lens.
As this lens is a part of standard range from Olympus you can’t expect too much from it, but it is able to produce surprisingly good pictures. One tip is to stop it down a bit to get sharper pictures and F/8 seems to be the sweet spot for this lens.

Read the full user report of the Olympus Zuiko 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 ED lens here.

Olympus has updated the firmware for 3 lenses; the new pancake lens Zukio Digital ED 25mm F2.8, Zukio Digital ED 14-42mm F3.5-5.6 and Zukio Digital ED 40-150mm F4.0-5.6. The update improves the focusing system when used with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-L10 DSLR camera.

Information about the firmware update from Olympus:
“-Improved the precision of focusing by using the IMAGER AF in combination with the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.fs Lumix DMC-L10.”

Olympus Zuiko 14-35mm f/2.0

Digitalcamerareview.com has reviewed the Olympus Zuiko 14-35mm (equivalent to 28mm to 70mm) f/2.0 Digital ED SWD lens. This is the first standard zoom lens that features a constant f/2.0 aperture. At about $2,600 this lens is part of Olympus’ Super High Grade (SHG) range of professional lenses with, among other features, weather sealing, SWD (Supersonic Wave Drive) focusing system and high quality optics.

Digitalcamerareview.com ends up giving the Olympus Zuiko 14-35mm lens, unsurprisingly, a very good rating due to the lens’ excellent image quality, silky smooth and silent focusing motor and sharp wide open. The small cons are of course the hefty price and pretty bulky size of the lens.
Seems like an excellent lens for professional Four Thirds photographers.

Read the full review of the Olympus Zuiko 14-35mm f/2.0 lens here.

Olympus E-420 DSLR

DIWA Labs has tested 3 new Olympus cameras; the new compact DSLR E-420, the superzoom compact camera SP-570UZ with a staggering 20x optical zoom and the compact µ 1020 (known as Stylus 1020 in USA) that have 7x optical zoom.

Read the full tests of the Olympus E-420 DSLR, SP-570UZ and µ 1020 here.

The tests done by DIWA Labs are very technical so you need to read their test guide to understand the test results.