Really not bad

I 've just bought this lens to use with my EM10II on one trip to Hawaii.

I plan to shoot whales and dolphins and the birds that I can get by chance.

I had not seem this lens in person previously and it striked me how compact and light it is. It balances very well with my camera and the olympus add-on grip.

The EM10II is not a speed demon regarding AF. Indeed it is the slowest camera that I have used in this regard.

It also hunts a bit back and forth with this lens if you set it to AF-C. AF-S is quick and precise.

I do not advise the use of a cluster of 9 focus points. They are messy and the focus plane gets all over the place. I use the central AF point and get good results with birds perched. Birds in flight is another matter and I would not advise the use of EM10II for this.

The lens is very sharp in all FLs, even wide open. There is no veiling haze that I perceive.

OOF is nicely rendered.

Mine has a very stiff focus ring. Okish for a 300 USD lens. Hope it gives a bit with usage.

All in all, very satisfied.

My first try:

For what I read here, there must be either wild sample variation or user variation.

75mm wide open. Processed with Olympus Workspace without any adjustment whatsoever from my part.

I remember testing this lens when it was still something like $800 and being amazed at how unusable it was above 200mm. At $300, I’d say it’s FINE. f/6.3 is pretty darn dark though, especially on m43.

Looks like you won in the 75-300 lottery, congratulations. I was not as lucky. Very nice for a first try!

I have the lens and find its really hit and miss when it comes to final results

Not bad for hand held and untouched by PP - except crop - but i do have some disasters also

Bobbert wrote:

jaiyenyen wrote:

I have the lens and find its really hit and miss when it comes to final result

Hit and miss suggests problems with technique or conditions, but a good lens. A bad lens has no hits. Handholding at 300mm mft is a learned skill. Low light, or the subject being too far away are problematic conditions.

Figure the lens is as good with regards to IQ as the very best shots one gets. With my new EM-1 II the hit rate is higher, but would be higher yet at F5-5.6 and with a superior for focus acquisition higher quality lens. But here is an example of feather detail. Note that even here I am only able to shoot at 1/200 second at base ISO in sunshine. Still, for the price it is (or can be) a very good lens. Maybe not great, but very good.

Pine Siskin - the feather detail is great on the original jpeg but is lost mostly in uploading to DPR.

I just sold a 17x22 print of this one...

As I said above, the smaller bodies require a better grip to add stability to such a long FL.

I expect you to reconsider ditching this lens for more expensive ones. They are certainly better but much bigger and heavier. If you hike a lot, this is a concern.

I tend to rationalise how much IQ is enough for most uses.

How big should I print this to see any optical flaw?

Lichtspiel wrote:

Looks like you won in the 75-300 lottery, congratulations. I was not as lucky. Very nice for a first try!

I've been reading so many reviews saying buying the 75-300 is a gamble. The quality may be bad, why ?

IMHO, the lens is an easy scapegoat for wrong setup choices and even lousy technique.

This lens is a consumer grade one, very affordable, with a dark aperture, but very compact and light. It is expected that its QC is not at the same level of the PRO lens line. But it says Made in Japan behind it. So this can't be that bad. I've tested 3 lenses. All of them were very good.

Funny Valentine wrote:

Lichtspiel wrote:

Looks like you won in the 75-300 lottery, congratulations. I was not as lucky. Very nice for a first try!

I've been reading so many reviews saying buying the 75-300 is a gamble. The quality may be bad, why ?

There is something called "sample variance". Especially with non-pro lenses, there tends to be a number of them that for whatever reason are de-centered or just soft. This can be the case from the get go, or happen during usage (banging, falls, etc) so beware if you buy refurb/used lenses.

It's a well-known issue affecting different lenses. Lens construction isn't simple, and tiny variances can lead to imperfect optics. Happens even with very expensive lenses (example).

The other side is that at 300mm (600mm equiv) one needs good technique because any operator movement is greatly magnified, so much that the image stabilization system may not be able to balance out the shake completely, and/or faster shutter speeds are required.

So what you find here are three situations - folks who have a good lens, apply appropriate techniques and get good results and then tell everyone that they are dummies for saying they got a bad lens. Then those with great lenses but shaky techniques, and finally, those who just got a soft lens.

BWfoto wrote:

I was having so many problems trying to get a sharp image with this lens. However I really think it is the Pen F giving me so many AF headaches. I just ordered a EM1.2 so I can’t wait to see how this lens performs now

Earlier on in the thread I mentioned the hit and miss qualities of the lens and it was the focussing I referred to - even on a Em1.2 body in tropical levels of sunlight - but when it does focus its a good lens for the money

Bobbert wrote:

jaiyenyen wrote:

I have the lens and find its really hit and miss when it comes to final result

Hit and miss suggests problems with technique or conditions, but a good lens. A bad lens has no hits.

That’s what I used to think, but I got what looks like a lemon copy of the 300mm and it sometimes produces sharp results. That initially made me blame my technique, but just to be sure, I put the lens on a tripod, facing a wall approximately 75m away (if the “focus distance” metadata is to be believed), and repeated the following procedure approximately a dozen times:

1. defocus manually
2. refocus with AF
3. shoot

Out of the 12 shots that I got in this fashion, a few were reasonably sharp edge-to-edge, a few were soft throughout, but more curiously, many had sharp parts and horribly blurry blotches (generally slightly above and to the left of the center but not even always). All from the same copy, within one minute.

And this sort of thing is even harder to spot in real-life images, where the blurry blotches might coincide with the naturally out-of-focus areas of your photos (or they don’t but you can’t tell, and you’re left wondering if perhaps you missed focus, when in fact it is definitely a failure of the lens).

So, I wouldn’t anymore dismiss the possibility of a lens being defective just because it manages a good shot.

After some frustration with out of focus birds in a busy environment, I realised that I was using the nine central focus points and this is apparently too much for my camera to calculate.

I switched to only the central AF point and S-AF and solved the problem. Since then, every missed shot is to blame on me or E-M10II, but not the lens.