PANASONIC LUMIX G II Lens, 20MM, F1.7 ASPH., MIRRORLESS Micro Four Thirds, H-H020AK (USA Black)

Product Information

While the Panasonic 25mm F1.7 shows some longitudinal CA wide open, it becomes much less noticeable when you stop down a bit. Still, at 100%, you can certainly spot some purple and green fringing in the out-of-focus regions on the left side of this image, in the vines and stems. Anyway, the Olympus Pen cameras are entirely magic and I’m quite certain, when handled properly, with the best glass, are capable of broadcast quality filmmaking. PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. Although the original was highly regarded, the range of rival offerings has increased dramatically. Olympus introduced a high-grade 17mm f1.8 model to compete directly, and Panasonic added a Leica branded 25mm f1.4 that must surely be tempting sales away from the diminutive 20mm. We used the space on the right to show the lens design. For the connoisseurs among us: 7 lens elements, including two aspherical, in 5 groups.

The diminutive 20mm F1.7 isn't the smallest lens currently on the market (the Olympus M. Zuiko Digital 17mm F2.8 Pancake shaves a couple of millimeters off in each dimension), but it's unusually fast for such a compact design, letting in a stop and a half more light than the above-mentioned 17mm (or Olympus's Four Thirds-mount Zuiko Digital 25mm F2.8). Construction is reassuringly solid, with high quality finish and a metal mount. The weight is just 100g. The Lumix 25mm is the full frame equivalent of a 50mm lens. So how does this focal length work for landscapes? Well, this was the first lens that got more challenging to use. I wanted to zoom out many times! From the measurements, it appears the resolution outer corners always lags relative to the center. In practice that is not noticeable, because the resolution in the outer corners up to aperture 4 remains well over 1000 LW/PH. While the lens has a fair degree of barrel distortion in its optical design (which is to be expected, as the M43 system prioritizes compact size), distortion is fully corrected for, digitally, in the camera's JPEGs and/or in your Raw converter. This means straight lines will look, well, straight (see the images above the flowers for an example). The lens also shows minimal vignetting wide open and any traces of vignetting are gone by F2.8.

Pros and Cons

WYSIWYG score:This table shows the performance of this lens when you save the files in the camera as jpg, including all in-camera lens corrections (distortion, chromatic aberration). This score gives you for this lens/test camera combination: “What you see is what you get”. It’s most noticeable in very strong areas of contrast, as shown in these crops: Panasonic camera used on the left, Olympus on the right, top images show crops from JPEG, underneath the raw images processed in Adobe Camera Raw – the Panasonic image is automatically corrected in ACR, while the Olympus image needs purple fringing correction to be switched on manually. I recently made a full switch to m4/3 & sold all of my Nikon kit, which included a D300 & alot of glass that i collected over the years. Handling | Compared to | Autofocus and focus breathing | Image quality | Conclusion | Samples | Full specifications At maximum aperture, sharpness in the centre of the frame is already excellent and the clarity produced towards the edges of the frame is very good. Stopping the lens down to f/4 improves the sharpness towards the edges to excellent levels and outstanding levels in the centre. Smaller apertures result in a loss of sharpness due to diffraction, but the quality is still very good across the frame down to f/11.

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. Panasonic GX7– The GX7 is a camera that may go best with the lens due to its smaller size–which works best with the lens’s small size.If there's a weakness in the lens, it would be significant corner shading when used at larger apertures. This is especially noticeable when used wide open, where we note corners which are a full stop darker than the center of the image. This light falloff reduces as the lens is stopped down, becoming 3/4 of a stop at ƒ/2, and 1/2 a stop at ƒ/2.8. At ƒ/4 it remains more or less constant at a third-of-a-stop of light falloff.

Ultimately, though it's not optically perfect, for most folks, the Panasonic Lumix G 25mm F1.7 ASPH is going to be more than good enough. The overall image quality from the 20mm f1.7 II lens from Panasonic is truthfully pretty damned good. There is a healthy amount of sharpness, contrast, and overall solid color rendition built into this lens. When you couple this with its great build quality and focusing abilities you’ve got yourself quite the winner.The 'cats-eye' bokeh is mostly gone by F4. However, bokeh discs becomes less rounded. Specifically, the polygonal shape of the lens's 7-blade aperture becomes more pronounced in the out-of-focus highlights, when you stop down past F2.8, and this can have a slightly negative impact on bokeh in general.