Oly 100-400mm vs. Pana 100-400mm - quick and dirty sharpness comparison

I pre-ordered the Oly 100-400mm lens a couple of weeks ago and picked it up from the store yesterday. I also have the Pana 100-400mm and while I'm generally speaking pretty happy with it, I bought the Oly with hopes that it could be still a just notch sharper as the early reviews and comparisons gave some indications of that. I was also interested in the possibility to use the Oly teleconverters.

I usually do a very basic "quick and dirty" sharpness test on any lens that I buy. This time of course I wanted to also see how the Oly fares against Pana.

Test set up:

- Test target a product box with fairly sharp printed characters (I said it was quick and dirty ), shot at a distance of appr. 3meters.

- Camera Pana G9, hand held

- Settings: AF-C, dual IS (Pana) / lens IS (Oly) ON, 400mm, f6.3, 1/1600s, ISO320

- 12 shots taken with each lens, images "assessed" by eyeballing...

I'm aware that typically you'd probably want to do lens sharpness test/comparison using a tripod with IS switched off and so on, but the above settings reflect roughly the typical ones that I use when rummaging through the bushes after birds. Purpose of the test after all was to get a feel of whether the Oly gives me the benefit over Pana that I was hoping it to give for my particular use.

Below I've attached a sample image taken with each lens.

Oly:

Oly 400mm f6.3 1600 ISO 320 100%-ish crop

Pana:

Pana 400mm f6.3 1600 ISO 320 100%-ish crop

My conclusion: images taken with Pana were consistently sharper than the images taken with Oly. The difference is not massive, but it is certainly visible and consistent across all the images taken.

I have to again emphasize that this is not in any way a properly carried out "scientific" approach to such comparison, but it certainly gave me the answers that I was looking for.

The early reviews and comparisons seemed to put the Oly a bit ahead of the Pana lens on sharpness. Of course what was compared though was a sample provided for review by Oly and a random, in some cases rented Pana. There is always the sample variation to consider and I doubt Oly provided samples for review that just barely passed the QC on sharpness/resolution.

Since it does not seem that the Oly lens gives me the sharpness benefit that I was hoping, I'm likely to return it. I bought the lens from a larger electronics retailer with a generous return policy just in case...

A few random observations:

- As it's usually the case with Oly on Pana bodies in my experience, the lens feels a bit looser on the mount compared to Pana on Pana. Perhaps the mount manufacturing tolerancing is different

- Based on observing stability of the image, the Pana dual IS seems to beat the heck out of Oly lens IS

- Oly is quite a bit chunkier and feels a bit plasticky compared to Pana, but still feels solid enough

Marko