PANASONIC LUMIX G II Lens, 20MM, F1.7 ASPH., MIRRORLESS Micro Four Thirds, H-H020AK (USA Black)

Product Information

Here is another image I shot along with a crop. Just a plain old roll of paper towels but with a little processing to give it some depth…

Macro performance is nothing to write home about here: just 0.13x magnification, with a minimum close-focusing distance of 20cm (about 8 inches). Image quality is almost flawless. Shoot at f/2.8 for sharpest images and also at f/4 for eliminating the vignetting. I may have said that the lens is sharper at f/2.8 but you'll be surprised at the image quality at f/1.7!I recently made a full switch to m4/3 & sold all of my Nikon kit, which included a D300 & alot of glass that i collected over the years. The lens is quite resistant to chromatic aberration, showing only slight magenta fringing in areas of high contrast in the corners of the image. This lens is so compact; there is no room for image stabilization. But considering the focal length and the brightness of this lens, image stabilization will seldom be missed. Seems to me this is the main reason pros avoid iMovie not realizing that using the entire iLife suite of programs is where the power lies.

The focus isn't all that brisk, and it's not exactly silent. The focus-by-wire system (common to all mFT lenses) makes manual focus less pleasant than it might be. Even the 45-200mm isn’t a bad lens upto 150mm it’s pretty sharp, but starts to drop off after that but still very usable and nothing abit of lightroom can’t sort out. Handling | Compared to | Autofocus and focus breathing | Image quality | Conclusion | Samples | Full specifications

Pros and Cons

As falloff and distortion are corrected by the camera's image processing engine when shooting JPEGs, falloff and distortion will only be easily visible when shooting in RAW format.

Olympus also makes a 'nifty fifty' similar to this one. It's a little more expensive, but it's also a bit more compact. Other options in this segment include the faster, though longer Sigma 30mm F1.4 and the higher-end Panasonic/Leica 25mm F1.4 II. I was learning how to anticipate the longer focal length by now, and started spotting scenes that would work well taken from a distance, with the sunlight coming through the trees, the image appearing more “zoomed in” or “cropped”. The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column.Of course, for a little more money, you can get Sigma's slightly faster 30mm F1.4 DC DN lens, which is also a strong optical performer. But the trade-off is a tighter crop (60mm in Full-frame terms) and a lens construction that's quite a bit longer and about twice as heavy as the Panasonic. But maybe that’s a good thing. Quality over quantity. And I do feel that the quality of photos taken with a prime lens exceeds that of a zoom lens overall. Not just in sharpness and details, but artist’s creativity. Another difference is the weight of the new lens vs the original, with the new lens weighing 100g compared to 87g for the original, with both being very lightweight lenses.