Legacy fast prime - or alternative ?

I'm not sure what kind of shooting you do, but I use the Zuiko 50 1.8 all the time. usually stopped down to 2.8. Here is an example of both the bokeh and spectral highlights you can get.

Many, many thanks to all who chimed in with their experience/suggestions - including images.

Have to admit, I never considered the Speedbooster option before.

That said, last night at home I went hands-on with my current equipment to better gauge my requirements. And I may have to eat some of my words from earlier.

1. With my (heavy!) 4/3 14-54mm mark 1 (f2.8) off my E500 attached to the EPL-6 via the adapter - the combo becomes awkward - and not suitable for dangling over the shoulder.

2. The autofocus with the above combo works, but it takes a few seconds to lock focus in low light. OK for museums, but probably inconvenient for people portraits in restaurants etc.

3. Manual focus with above combo works well, but see 1 above. I wear glasses (short sighted, minus 8 in both eyes) - hence minimum visual focussing distance is currently around 40cm - which means holding the camera almost at arm's length to see the LCD screen - and hence not always practical to focus manually.

4. Still with the 14-54mm at 36mm focal length, the aperture selected is f3.1 - and even at that diameter, at close focus, the lens produces beautiful results - and lovely 'bokeh. ' In the type of indoor low light I typically shoot, at f3.1, ISO-6400, the shutter speed selected was 1/40s - and with IS on, this is comfortably within my working range. So I guess f1.8 or 1.7 apertures would be more than enough in terms of light gathering and shallow DOF.

With this in mind, I would be better off having auto-focus and a smaller, lighter lens. And since both the f1.8 Oly and f1.7 Panny micro4/3 lenses already mentioned in the thread are within my budget, I think this would work well for me. Just need do a 24-hour sanity check and to read a few more reviews before committing.

As for my 14-54mm+E500 - sadly, these haven't been touched since I bough the EPL6 in January of this year.