Your thoughts and experience: Oly 75mm or Pana 35-100?

Thank you for your replies, folks. Good insights here.

So, I ended up buying the Panasonic zoom lens despite its high cost as I think it'd make my m4/3 system "complete", with good zoom lenses from 14mm all the way to 200mm (equiv.) plus a couple of special-purpose primes. Oh, and the E-PM2's kit lens which I forgot to mention.

I guess I won't be buying any more lenses for a good while. Or cameras for that matter!

@Chrisphoto

Yes I thought about the temptation to buy the 75 anyway, but Amazon's charged my credit card for the 35-100 and I got this very dissuasive SMS reporting the amount. Oddly enough, the temptation vanished!

I figured I'd pay a little extra for the versatility of having multiple focal lengths, plus image stabilization in-lens (I'm keeping the GX1 for the foreseeable future). Any future Olympus zoom in that range, however fast, won't include that.

@Jman13, daddyo

I think I needed to hear experiences like yours to sort of "validate" a $1300 purchase. The versatility of a zoom lens, even at the cost of 1 1/2 stop, finally won me over. I'll be using it more, especially for the sort of event shots hat Greg mentions, plus candid portraits. The 75, while very nice, wouldn't see that much use, and at $1k with a hood it was harder to justify in the end.

@eques

Thanks for the comment on my lens choice. I'm trying to cover all bases here, and if I count just one body, my whole kit weighs less than a full-frame camera body or most of the full-frame zooms in the ranges I have with m4/3! That's the beauty of this system and it trumps most full-frame advantages for me. (having said that, I do own an Alpha 850 and a bunch of 1980s Minolta lenses bought for a song on eBay, but I'll end up selling all of it for lack of use. Nicer, more natural-looking images than m4/3 for sure, but I just can't take them everywhere).

@tgutgu, Adjuster

The full range from 14 to 200mm (equiv.) is what I'm aiming for here. Looks like a killer combo. 7-14 plus 12-35 already is.

@ArtP

I see your point, but I'm going for focal length versatility here and hope things work out OK at ISO1600+. Depth-of-field, or rather lack of it isn't much of a problem for me. I actually think I'm "safer" with some more DOF. Getting the focus right with extremely thin DOF is a bit of pain for me!

@Ulric

Yes I considered the 40-150 from Olympus but it's just too slow for some work, and would probaly be useless with the GX1 except in very favourable conditions. You can't beat it in value for money though, even at the $199 regular price.