In praise of the Oly 12-50, mostly

It seems fashionable to slam the 12-50, but as a new OM-D and first-time micro 4/3 owner just over from Pentax by way of the Nikon DSLR dark side, I think this lens is quite good and holds its own with other reasonably priced standard zooms and many standard primes.

I've owned and used the good Pentax and Nikon 18-55s kit lenses, the Nikon kit 18-105 and the very good Nikon 16-85, plus the excellent Tamron (non-VC) 17-55 and 24-75 f/2.8s on Pentax. Plus I did an exhaustive two-week test run with a Panasonic GH2 with a borrowed much praised 14-45.

I also used excellent primes like the Nikon 50 f/1.8 and Pentax 30 f/2.8 Macro. All of this to say that although the are variation, none were so much better IMO than the 12-50 at it's sweet spot settings. In fact, I'd guess that most people at normal 8x10" or even 11x14" print viewing distance wouldn't really perceive an IQ difference between output from these modern kits zooms, including the 12-50 or even most primes.