Olympus 100-400 - first shots and impressions
Aug 27, 2020
22
As is my luck, the day I received this lens, summer ended. I was hoping to hunt for some butterflies, but looks like that is not happening.
Anyway, my first outing was on a rainy evening, with the x1.4 teleconverter mounted. That was of course a stupid idea. As evidenced by the photo below:
Not a fan of shooting at ISO 10000.
So today I took the lens without TC for a quick morning stroll before work. Not the best weather either, but still a lot better (was hoping for some nice morning sunlight, but no).
Didn't get much, but here's some full res ones that turned out ok (processed to taste).
A little bit of motion blur here, I think
Definitely some motion blur here around the head of the bird, I should have shot continuous when pushing the shutter speed so low.
No motion blur here, and I think this nicely shows how sharp this lens is at 400mm. I'm very happy with that.
First impressions
The lens is big. I know Olympus touts how small this lens is, but it is not. When I first used Panasonic Leica 100-400, I was surprised by how small and lightweight it was. It was clearly designed to be as small as possible. With this Olympus, it's about what I expected.
Build quality is very solid. I love the feeling of the barrel beyond the tripod collar. It has a nice "grip" to it. I much prefer this over my 12-100, with its slippery metal exterior. Also, the lens hood is a simple plastic bayonet affair.
Mechanically, it feels very good. Focus ring is very smooth with the right amount of resistance. Zoom action is smooth, but I would not mind if it required less force. It's nowhere near the stiffness and stickiness of the PL 100-400 I used, but I would not mind if it were easier to turn. After all, there is a lock switch to make sure it does not extend when walking around. But from what I can tell, there's no need to use it, the barrel will not extend on its own. Alas, the placement of the lock switch is perfect. It's so easy to toggle that it makes it a no-brainer to use it. I wonder if it will loosen up a bit with use.
Image quality put a smile on my face. I compared it to my 100-300 in controlled conditions (the small critter scenario) and at 400mm f/6.3 it is slightly sharper than 100-300 at 300mm f/6.3. At 300mm, Olympus wins pants down by a large margin. Unsurprisingly, at 560mm f/9 it is less sharp than even Panasonic, but the most visible thing is a loss of "punch". There's still plenty of detail in the image, but it is noticeably less contrasty. It almost looks as if there's a very faint haze. In all cases, Olympus shows less chromatic aberration (of both kinds). In my test scene, it simply did not show any CA, while Panasonic did suffer from it despite the fact that this scene was not particularly demanding in this regard.
IS is a hit and miss. Lack of Sync-IS is noticeable. The lesser "dual IS" mode does very badly in video when any panning is involved, producing jarring "jumps". But does seem to help when you want to keep the scene as stable as possible. At 560mm, it's a struggle, both in video and in stills. 1/50s was already a hit and miss for me. I though that since I could easily do 1/20 at 400mm, 560mm would not be much harder. But it is noticeably harder. I'll definitely have to practice to get better results and to learn what my limits are in practice.
Finally, while I am very excited about close focusing capability, especially with the teleconverter, I have not had the chance to make use of it yet.
Overall, I'm very happy. It is about what I expected from it. The performance with x1.4 teleconverter is satisfactory so far, but this combination is for situations with plenty of light. Unfortunately, I do not expect any sunny weather for the next week. In general I can already see that handling 560mm involves some learning curve. So this will be fun.
