Olympus 45mm 1.8 focus sound noise

Hi. I recently bought Olympus 45mm f1.8 for my GH4 &G80/G85 bodies. I can hear the focus mechanism on video, is this normal for this lens ?

All lenses have noise as the focus motor are moving however this should only be audible with your headphones or on a completely silent scene

MarcusTitus wrote:

Hi. I recently bought Olympus 45mm f1.8 for my GH4 &G80/G85 bodies. I can hear the focus mechanism on video, is this normal for this lens ?

Yes, your camera uses contrast-detect autofocus. Advanced Panasonic bodies use DepthFromDefocus but only with Panasonic lenses (because they need very detailed lens information).

So you are definitely on contrast-detect AF.

The thing is... CD-AF is very, very good aquiring one-time focus. But it can not do continuous autofocus. It maximizes contrast, but it can only know it has found the maximum contrast by comparison.   So it has to defocus a little... and then focus again.

Olympus uses Phase Detect autofocus in the M5.III, M1.II and higher.  PD-AF can instantly determine that an image is in focus and thus does not defocus-focus-defocus-focus.

Panasonic still refuses to apply this technology in any of their cameras.

Check if you camera has DFD. If it does, do try it with a Panasonic lens. It might improve.

Not at all. If the lens doesnt support DFD it moves less as paradox. Some lenses have more noise than others to test you put the camera in manual focus and turn the ring using headphones

if the lens is noisy it just is full stop

panasonic cameras have super sensitive microphones that record anything that goes use an external microphone and the problem goes away

MarcusTitus wrote:

Hi. I recently bought Olympus 45mm f1.8 for my GH4 &G80/G85 bodies. I can hear the focus mechanism on video, is this normal for this lens ?

Update your camera and lens firmware.

I sold my M Zuiko 25mm f1.8 to a Panasonic owner a year ago and he complained about similar sounds. It was weird because the lens was always super quiet on my cameras.

He did the firmware update and the problem just disappeared.

I have three lenses from Olympus all optically fabulous

17mm 1.2 pro

60mm macro

75mm 1.8

All the above are noisy not just with a Panasonic camera but with an Olympus camera in video. I think the MSC they advertise is really just marketing and a symptom Olympus does not really care about video shooters?

The noise occurs when the camera moves the motor to adjust focus distance and is unrelated to how the camera focuses DFD or Phase detect in fact it is noisy on all my cameras.