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A charmer,
Update: 5 Mar 2013
I’ve been charmed by this lens. Ever since using the Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 lens, I was hooked on manual lens. I love the way it handles with a dedicated aperture ring.
The 17.5mm lens is the wider and bigger brother of the 25mm lens.
The lens comes with its lens cap, a wide angle screw-on lens hood and the lens hood cap.
The build quality is excellent. The whole thing made of metal and glass. It’s one of the larger and heavier lens compared to other Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens. It weighs 540g.
The heavy weight means it’s better to use this lens on a camera with a good grip. It’s still comfortable enough to hang around the neck the whole day because with camera and body, it’s still under 1kg.
It’s also bigger. Filter thread is 58mm. I use a 8X ND filter when shooting under daylight.
This is a fully manual lens. There’s no electrical contact points at the back of the lens. No EXIF data will be passed to the camera, so you’ll not have information such as the aperture.
The aperture ring does 1 full stop with 2 clicks. There’s a new feature added. You can make aperture ring click-less by pulling back the front dial and turning it 180 degrees. A yellow dot replaces the white dot’s position, and the aperture ring becomes click-less. It’s a nifty feature for video because it minimizes flicker as you change the exposure.
At f/0.95, this is a fast and bright lens, good for low light photography. The other benefit of the f/0.95 aperture is the shallow depth of field (DOF) that can be used to blur out backgrounds. MFT with their smaller sensors required larger apertures to create shallow depth of field.
I find the manual focus a joy to use. Even without the manual focus assist zoomed in mode, I can see clearly whenever the subject is in focus.
I love the photos from the lens. You can see some sample shots and video in the links I provided in the comments section below.
In terms of performance, it’s quite similar to the Voigtlander 25mm lens. At f/0.95, images are slightly soft and the corners very much so. It improves quickly at f/1.4, and the optimal seems to be around f/2 and f/2.8. I usually use the lens at f/1.4. For video work, that softness is not obvious.
Vignetting is strong for this lens and only goes away at f/4. Bokeh is rendered a creamy manner.
Purple fringing at f/0.95 is quite strong also, visible even in web-sized images. It goes away around f/2.
Check out more sample shots to see if purple fringing and vignetting is going to be an issue for you. So far from the photos I’ve shot, I don’t find it to be much of an issue.
I bought the lens for wide angle subject isolation. It’s not as good compared to fullframe sensors but it’s the best you can get from a Micro Four Thirds sensor. If I need the depth of field, I would have gone with fullframe, but I prioritize having a lightweight photography setup. That’s the compromise. It’s difficult to get a full height human standing in a sea of good blur. That’s just the way it is with Micro Four Thirds. Cats and dogs, yes. Not a human.
The closest competitor lens are probably the Olympus 17mm f/1.8, Olympus 17mm f/2.8, Sigma 19mm f/2.8 and Panasonic 20mm f/1.7. But they compete because of the focal length, and they are much cheaper. Even the fastest Panasonic 20mm lens is still more than 1 stop slower than the Voigtlander. But if you already have the 20mm lens, there’s not much reason to ditch it if unless you need the f/0.95.
The f/0.95 makes a crucial difference for night shoots. Once, for a trip, I chose the Olympus 17mm f/1.8mm lens over the Voigtlander to cut down some weight. BAD MISTAKE. All the photos and videos I took at night were not usable at ISO 3200 and 6400. f/0.95 is a must especially if you have no idea of the lighting conditions (at night).
Being a manual focus lens has its advantages. You can focus as fast as your hands…
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|Makes night time photography with a micro 4/3rds camera practical,
On a full frame camera a 0.95 lens like this one has a very narrow depth of field, bordering on the unusable. At 3′ the depth of field is 1.5″ which is barely enough to have the nose and face in focus at the same time and it’s tricky to make work in low light. But the same is not true on the 4/3rds system where a 0.95 lens will have a more usable depth of field of 3″ at 3′. This is because 4/3rds cameras have twice the depth of field for a given F stop when compared to full frame cameras. From a depth of field perspective this 17.5mm 0.95 lens on a 4/3rds system performs the same as a 35mm 1.9 lens on a full frame system, a combination most people find quite useful at night. However, the fast nature of the lens will also make the relatively slow Micro 4/3rds sensor set to an ISO of 800 provide the same shutter speed as a very fast full frame camera set to an ISO of 3200. In other words your micro 4/3rds camera set to an ISO of 800 with this 17.5mm lens set to F 0.95 will have the same depth of field, field of view, and shutter speed as a full frame camera set to ISO 3200 with a 35mm lens set to F1.8. Yes, it’s manual focus but most people use manual focus in low light anyway because autofocus performs so poorly in low light. To put it simply this lens enables a micro four thirds camera to perform in low light with very similar characteristics to the fastest full frame cameras.
This is also a reasonable lens in daylight because when set to F8 the depth of field keeps everything from 4′ to infinity in focus. You can use the manual focus if you want to but it’s not necessary if you’d like to just point and shoot. This isn’t unique to this lens of course but the point is manual lenses are more reasonable on a 4/3rds sytem than they are on a full frame system because you don’t really have to focus in daylight if you don’t want to. The fact that depth of field is doubled on a 4/3rds system can be used to provide a very usable hyper-focal camera at F stops which minimize diffraction effects.
I should also mention that the same low light reasoning above applies to how this lens extends the 4/3rds system to make it reasonable for those who want to use shallow depth of field to isolate their subjects. Before this lens (and it’s sister 25mm 0.95 lens from voigtlander) the best you could do was the 25mm 1.4 lens from Panasonic. Unfortunately, a 25mm 1.4 lens on a 4/3rds system provides the same depth of field as a 50mm 2.8 lens on a full frame camera which is ok, but not great for using minimal depth of field to isolate a subject. The 17.5mm 0.95 lens on a 4/3rds system provides the same depth of field as a 35mm 1.9 lense on a full frame camera, a combination that is much more useful when working with shallow depth of field.
So for me while I like the build quality and think the optics are fine what makes this lens so appealing is the way in which a 0.95 17.5mm lens uniquely expands the utility of the 4/3rds system to make it comparable to full frame cameras by taking advantage of the doubling in depth of field and 2 stop improvement in sensitivity offered by the 4/3rds system. I love panasonic’s 25mm 1.4 but it doesn’t take you to the night time equivalent of a full frame camera with a 35mm 1.8 lens the way this lens does nor does it give you the depth of field control that full frame photographers expect from their cameras in the way that this lens does.
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