the barrel is dominated by the wide zoom ring, which is somewhat stiff in operation but stays firmly where you put it. In front of this is the slim manual focus ring, which turns nice and smoothly, and behind is a slim silver-accented grip for holding the lens when taking it on or off the camera. Right at the front is a bayonet mount for the optional LH-61C lens hood, and that's your lot.

MPB puts photo and video kit into more hands, more sustainably. Every month, visual storytellers sell more than 20,000 cameras and lenses to MPB. Choose used and get affordable access to kit that doesn’t cost the earth. And that pros of the Olympus are: less expensive, [maybe more reliable weather sealing (Olympus has it IPX rated)?], 10 extra mm of reach Over the past decade, mirrorless cameras have dramatically changed the landscape in the photographic equipment market. The likes of Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic and Sony have built up compelling alternatives for photographers fed up of dealing with the size and weight of DSLRs, but unwilling to sacrifice image quality. Third-party lens manufacturers were initially cautious about producing their own mirrorless lenses, but now there’s a wide selection available, which continues to grow. Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc. In the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm f/4-5.6 II, Olympus employed an iris diaphragm with 7 rounded blades, which has resulted in a pretty decent, albeit not outstanding, bokeh for a zoom lens – at least in our opinion. However, recognising that bokeh evaluation is subjective, we have provided a few examples for your perusal.With the lens set to its maximum aperture, you can see some pretty heavy light fall-off in the corners, especially at the 150mm end of the zoom range.

Chromatic aberrations are well controlled at all but the widest end of the zoom when stopped down. At 14mm, fringing starts to exceed one pixel width at f/11 and gets more severe as the aperture is stopped down. Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc. to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. Photo editor Dan Bracaglia spent 48 hours shooting in the deserts of Southern, Utah, E-M5 III in hand. How to read our charts The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column.

Everything else looked awesome on the lens, great range, compact and pretty light weight, good build quality (but it’s not IPX rated, that’s advertised only recently for cameras like E-M1 X and Mark III and lenses like Olympus 100-400mm f 5-6.3 and 150-400mm f 4.5 Pro). Unfortunately, we found color fringing in our tests with this lens. Still though, there is no reason for you to cry about it, just incorporate another step. But for a lens at this price and offering so much, you have to expect it. We give the Olympus 14-150mm f4-5.6 II lens four out of five stars. Want one? B&H Photo has them right here for you. Recommended Cameras and Accessories