This is a great short/normal macro for Micro 4/3.

BurkPhoto wrote:

I use this lens for:

• Copying slides, negatives, prints, artwork, stamps, coins...
• Small product photography (thimbles, food, nuts&bolts, jewelry...)
• Portraits (waist-up or two people to full-length compositions)
• Animal portraits
• Video interviews and dialog scenes in film shorts

It's very versatile, tack sharp, stabilized, shows little to no distortion, and it's rugged and compact.

I can copy a quarter of a 35mm slide or negative with this lens, because 1:1 on Micro 4/3 is the size of the sensor. Put this on a Lumix G9, and it will make 80MB files for big blow-ups of tiny still objects. I use it with the Negative Lab Pro Plug-In for Adobe Lightroom Classic to make positive digital images of old film negatives.

The only things I don't like about the 30mm lens are that the filter size is 46mm, and there is a lack of lens hoods to use with it. Up close, a hood would be a problem, but beyond six inches, it could work. Panasonic could do its customers a huge favor by providing hoods with all lenses, and standardizing around just a few filter sizes.

My son liked this lens so much he bought one to do Lego animation videos.

Does he post his animations? I used to do stop motion animation, it how I got into cameras. Very time consuming but the end result is usually very satisfying.

All that said, if you want to photograph small biting or stinging things, Get the Olympus 60mm macro. If you need a longer portrait lens that doubles as a macro, get the Panasonic Leica 45mm macro. But if you do any volume of copy stand work or table-top photography, the 30mm is the best pick. It is a good replacement for the 55mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor I used for years on a Nikon F3 to copy all sorts of things to 35mm slides.

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Bill Burkholder is a retired training content developer, FileMaker solutions developer, and digital photography trainer. He's BurkPhoto on UglyHedgeHog.com.

I’m very happy with the 30mm, and have designed a simple slide copier attachment specifically for this lens. More details and 3D print files are on Thingiverse

I use it for my eBay product shots. It’s almost too good. Reveals every flaw and speck of dust! Super sharp lens but a bit slow to focus but that is normal with macro lenses. 
For hand held shots in the garden I enjoy using the touch to focus/shoot gimmick on the rear display of my GX85.

Nice review, thank you. 
Olympus 30mm is very good too but for me f/3,5 vs f/2,8 makes a difference.

It's 'Made in Japan' in case that matters to someone..

Thanks for the review.

Is anybody aware of a LED macro ring light,

perhaps even featuring adjustable brightness and color temperature,

with 46mm filter thread mounting ?

I love this tiny Pana 30mm macro lens too ! Thank you for the review

I also use it to scan medium formats film negatives. And also in the garden, where it is super easy to shoot subjects with enough depth of filed without a tripod, a macro photographer dream

My only concern is the lack of less hood (the light table can produce "flare" - ie loss of contrast - when scanning negatives...) Does anyone know where to find one ? Even a "do it yourself" or "chinese" model ?

Thanks !

rico7578 wrote:

I love this tiny Pana 30mm macro lens too ! Thank you for the review

I also use it to scan medium formats film negatives. And also in the garden, where it is super easy to shoot subjects with enough depth of filed without a tripod, a macro photographer dream

My only concern is the lack of less hood (the light table can produce "flare" - ie loss of contrast - when scanning negatives...) Does anyone know where to find one ? Even a "do it yourself" or "chinese" model ?

Thanks !

I found a little 46mm expandable rubber lens hood by Bower. It's perfect to expand and contract. It was marketed as some other brand like Opteca, but it was Bower. It's really small compressed.

Thanks but I finally found one also (metal, not rubber) : Cellonic LN-46S

BBbuilder467 wrote:

rico7578 wrote:

I love this tiny Pana 30mm macro lens too ! Thank you for the review

I also use it to scan medium formats film negatives. And also in the garden, where it is super easy to shoot subjects with enough depth of filed without a tripod, a macro photographer dream

My only concern is the lack of less hood (the light table can produce "flare" - ie loss of contrast - when scanning negatives...) Does anyone know where to find one ? Even a "do it yourself" or "chinese" model ?

Thanks !

I found a little 46mm expandable rubber lens hood by Bower. It's perfect to expand and contract. It was marketed as some other brand like Opteca, but it was Bower. It's really small compressed.

I have that hood. It has filter threads on the front, which is useful. Unlike some of the cheap rubber ones, it keeps its round shape quite well.

The 30mm lens does focus bracketing with some OMD cameras, up to 15 shots processed in camera automatically. Here’s a focus stack of 10 shots with a differential of 1 merged in EM1 MK II camera. The individual shots are also written to the card for processing in post, if desired. The merged image crops in somewhat, so one has to allow more space around the subject.