Review on 📷 Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-50mm F3.5-6.3 EZ Lens: A Versatile Silver Lens for Micro Four Thirds Cameras by Brad Schaefer

This will be a raving five star review of the product so let me take my complaints to the supplier. Revain offered this through Electronics Basket LLC, which I had never heard of before, at a 22.6% discount, which at the time of purchase was the only discounted price I could find for this lens. The day after I received it they started offering it 25% off from Sunset Electronics but such is life. The most annoying thing is the packaging I received it in: a white box with no markings, no instructions and no warranty card. The lens was wrapped in a transparent blue plastic tape, maybe original from Olympus, I don't know. In any case, I give no guarantees for the lens, the construction of which is obviously very complex! Fortunately, it works perfectly and has more than met my expectations. I've been using M4/3 for 11 months now and E-M5 for 10 months (started with Panasonic G3) and 12 months before that. -50mm Olympus M.ZUIKO, I bought nine M4/3 lenses so I have some redundancy and was able to sell a pair without losing functionality and now with this 12-50mm I get more redundancy - albeit not quite. There really is nothing quite like it in the M4/3's arsenal and it is by far the most versatile lens I own. I have an insanely good Lumix 14-45mm, but I often find myself needing to increase the width, and I knew that from the start, so I also bought a very bright 7-14mm Lumix, which I mostly just have use for shooting. 2mm under 14mm. Surprisingly I didn't even know the M.ZUIKO 12-50mm lens existed until a few weeks ago and I was blown away by the description of all its features so I had to have it! First IQ (image quality). Reading the reviews, I expected second-rate sharpness compared to my Lumix 14-45. Well, 12-50mm might be, but 14-45mm is so exceptional that even though it's not quite 14-45mm, you can be very happy with an IQ of 12-50mm across the entire zoom range. I'm a pixel artist and I can see the difference between this lens and the 14-45, but for general viewing it's more than acceptable. And that extra 2mm at the wide end is really impressive, something I always remember from my DSLR days and long experience with 24mm and 28mm FF lenses. That extra 2mm is probably the main advantage of this lens for me: it really makes a big difference and now my Lumix 7-14mm is used very rarely. (The extra 5mm at the other end doesn't make much of a difference.) Then there was the macro setting at 43mm. I'm a big fan of macro photography and always have been, having had a 1:1 prime lens since 1990, and I have both a Lumix 45mm macro lens (which I never use and have to sell) and an Olympus 60mm -Lens I use all the time. and it's one of my favorite lenses. Well let me tell you, I was blown away by the quality of the 12-50mm in 43mm macro mode! It's extremely sharp in that range, and it's so convenient to put the lens in this mode that I wonder how much this lens will cut me off with the Olympus 60mm! In any case, I almost never use it to zoom out to 1:1 and have yet to limit myself to 0.72x zoom on a 12-50mm lens at 43mm with amazing results. But remember, this lens came without documentation! It took me a while to play around with it before I figured out how to put it in macro mode. First, it requires two hands, so it must either stand on a tripod or be hung around the neck with a strap. You need to press the button on the side of the lens labeled MACRO while sliding the zoom ring forward two clicks. That's all. You are now shooting in the macro range of the 43mm lens. This is less convenient than using my Olympus 60mm, which has a continuous focus range of 0.62ft to infinity. The Olympus 12-50's macro range goes from 0.66 to just 1.6 feet, which is a pretty narrow range. The last thing that really caught my eye when I saw this lens was that it's splash and dust proof! I live in a rainy climate and until I bought this lens the only M4/3 lens that had this feature was my 60mm macro lens. Hardly any M4/3 lens has this function! Apparently, to do this you need a lens with an internal zoom function, a lens that maintains a fixed physical length at all zoom settings. I suppose this was quite common with my Nikon SLR/DLSR lenses because I remember using my zoom lenses for hours hiking in the pouring rain with no damage to either the body or the lens. What about M4/3? You have to get along with the program. Finally I have a splashproof KIT lens! It's a real relief, I tell you, because I really LOVE going out in the rain and taking pictures, loving the lighting and the tiny raindrops in macro shots. I'm interested in scaling by wire (electronic). I've played around with this feature a bit and it runs very smoothly, but probably only of interest to those interested in making films that haven't interested me since I was a teenager about a century ago. The zoom ring has three positions. Center position for Scaling by Wire. The innermost position allows manual zooming - of course without changing the length of the lens - so cute! What else? Everyone is talking about a "dark" aperture of f/6.3 at maximum zoom. I'm just not interested in "restriction". Most of my photographs are landscapes when I'm on a tripod, or when I'm doing macro photography I use a Metz 15 MS-1 Macro Flash at f/16. So f/6.3 was actually welcome because it allowed the lens to be quite small: no bigger than Olympus' tiny 60mm macro lens. Are there any disadvantages? Well, I noticed moderate flare, which is surprising as I've found that Olympus M.ZUIKO lenses are very resistant to flare. And of course Olympus has no hood. The flash isn't as bad as the purple flash on the Lumix 7-14mm, so I just have to be a little careful before I can get a stop.