Using the Canon FD 135mm made me appreciate just how lovely a portrait lens that has a relatively narrow field of view can be. I read a piece online, which I think might have been this Digital Camera World list, that made the case for the Olympus 75mm. Seeing a “well used” (read: scuffed a lot on the barrel, but fine on the glass) copy at mpb.com I went for it.
| Mount | Micro four Thirds |
| Weight | 305g |
| Purchased | 13 January 2024 |
| From | MPB |
| Price | £259 |
One of the things you’ll quickly find online is the difficulty of getting a shallow depth of field (as in having only your subject in focus with the background blurred) with a micro four thirds camera. While technically true, this lens is absolutely cracking at beautiful subject separation. The fall-off between the in-focus area and the out-of-focus areas is lovely; smooth, clean and the bokeh is not noisy so the background is not distracting.
This lens is sharp. Click on the image above and zoom in or download it full size; it’s impressive and it cuts through a lot of the perceived shortfalls of micro four thirds as a format.
The colour is beautiful; clear, crisp colours well rendered and without obvious flaws. There’s little flare and chromatic aberration seems well controlled. I like that in the image above shooting into the bright light you get a bit of that soft etherealness while still preserving contrast and sharpness.
The lens focuses well; clearly the camera plays a big role here, but what the lens is doing it does it professionally, with snappy focus without hunting and a big manual focus ring that moves smoothly. I think I’d favour it being just a tiny bit tighter, but this is likely a combination of my preferences being towards the harder to turn end, and this being a second hand “well used” lens.
It’s portraits of people where the lens especially shines (although I think this is far from the only use). The subject separation makes pictures pop, and 75mm encourages you to be a bit further away and therefore have subjects who are less self-conscious. One of the quirks of micro four thirds is that although most of the time we talk about equivalent field of view (so a 75mm MFT lens is equivalent to the same field of view as a 150mm full-frame lens), a 75mm lens is still optically a 75mm lens. At the near end this does cause some issues for micro four thirds – a 25mm MFT lens may have the same field of view as a full-frame 50mm lens, but the perspective distortion of a wide-angle lens is still there. By 75mm this has gone; you get the nice compression between the objects in the distance and facial features appear natural.
305g is towards the larger size for a micro four thirds lens, but it still feels pretty small (and nothing like a 150mm full-frame lens). When going to Hastings, as per the 12-32mm review, I took the 75mm too and didn’t feel weighed down by it, and enjoyed the extra reach it gave me.
It’s definitely not just about portraits. The small size, quick focus and lovely image quality makes it good at almost anything where you can get far enough back to capture the scene. I was surprised by how well it holds up at architectural photos; I think I imagined a “portrait” lens would be a bit soft off-centre and be all about shallow depth of field, but even only a bit stopped down to f/2.8 the bricks below are very sharp.
There’s not a great deal else to say about the design of the lens. There are no switches or buttons and no stabilisation; this is a typical and disappointing element about most Olympus lenses and it makes it much less useful on e.g. the Lumix GX8001 which has no stabilisation. The lens cap is really tiny thin, which hasn’t been an issue, but I do think I might lose it. It has a 58mm filter diameter just like nearly none of my other lenses do.
I was pretty unsure about this lens before purchase. It goes for new for £829 at the moment from wex, and I thought I’d easily get a good chunk of my £259 back if I didn’t like it and wanted to sell it on. But the very first (rubbish) test photo I took just pressing the shutter without looking where I was pointing showed me great detail and lovely out-of-focus rendering. It’s a wonderful lens that deserves to be shouted about.
The only reservation is 150mm equivalent field of view is quite a distance; you can find it hard to take a photo if you’re in a small room with someone else. I love the crop you get; the focus on details and on the face, and the fact it allows you to not be up in someone’s face. But it’s probably less of a walk around lens (although I have done a bit of this and really enjoyed using it in this way). At 305g it’s not so much the problem of carrying another lens; it’s more the issue of switching between lenses
But let me urge you to give it a go, as once I did I found it something I wanted to take out and wanted to use. It also really shows how good micro four thirds picture quality can be.
See the album of this lens’ photos on Flickr with the above ten.
- Also known as the GX850 in some places. Or the GF9 in some other places. Panasonic naming really is awful. ↩︎
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