Long lenses coming

I a few days time, two more long lenses will be announced. On January 5-6th, Oympus and Panasonic will launch their new premium telephoto lenses:

• Olympus 300mm f/4 IS PRO
  
• Lumix/Leica 100-400mm f/4-6.3 OIS
  

These are ultra long tele lenses, and not something you would buy unplanned, and bring along casually. Rather, people who buy lenses like this usually need them for specific applications, for example photographing sports or wildlife. They are not suited for casual snapshots.

With these lenses coming, it can be interesting to take a look at some other long lenses for comparison.

Most long lenses are, well, long. With the common construction, a telephoto lens needs to be physically long. However, some lenses avoid this, by using various tricks. Below are two 300mm lenses:

Nikon 300mm f/4E PF VR (left) and Tokina 300mm f/6.3 reflex for Micro Four Thirds (right)

The Nikon lens, at 150mm (6 inches) long, sure looks like a long lens. However, by using a Phase Fresnel (PF) lens it achieves the 300mm focal length with a 30% shorter physical length than its predecessor lens. Canon also use the same trick, but calls their lenses "Diffractive Optics" (DO).

The Tokina lens, on the other hand, is not long at all. This is because of the Reflex construction, which relies on reflections from mirror surfaces, rather than refractions inside glass elements, which is the norm.

So why aren't all tele lenses mirror reflex lenses? They have serious shortcomings, for example an appalling contrast when there are strong light sources. Read more about this in my review.

Also, the Tokina lens is manual focus only. The focus ring is really nice: Well dampened, and it has a very long travel range, making fine tuning of the focus easy.

But can you manually focus a tele lens without a tripod anyway? Modern cameras have various tricks to help you, like magnified view or focus peaking. I tested the lens on the Lumix GH4 and Olympus E-M5 II to see how it went:



The Lumix GH4 has focus peaking, however, it never really kicks in when using the Tokina reflex lens. Also, with the very long reach, it is hard to hold the camera stably enough to focus. The magnified view does help, though.

The Olympus E-M5 II has in-body image stabilization (IBIS), which operates when you half press the shutter. However, half pressing the shutter also messes up the focus peaking and magnified view. The focus peaking does help to find the right focus, though, and you can see in the video that it does toggle on and off when I have the shutter half pressed.

Even if this is a manual lens, it does have electrical contacts. These transfer the focal length (so you don't need to set it manually), and they report to the camera when you operate the focus ring, so that it can give you the focus aids automatically.

But the bottom line is that to focus this lens manually in a reliable way, a tripod is needed. With the focus peaking and IBIS, the Olympus E-M5 II was the best camera here, though.

Olympus 300mm f/4 IS PRO

Unusually for Olympus, this lens is expected to have optical image stabilization (IS). Olympus typically relies on in-body image stabilization only (IBIS).

I would guess that they add image stabilization to make the lens more usable for Panasonic camera users, and also because IBIS may have shortcomings with so long lenses.

It is natural to compare this lens with the other 300mm f/4 lens discussed above, the Nikon 300mm f/4E PF VR. Of course, the Olympus lens can only be used on Micro Four Thirds cameras, where it becomes equivalent to 600mm.

The Nikon lens, on the other hand, can be used on fullframe FX cameras, where it is, naturally, 300mm. On crop DX DSLRs, it corresponds to 450mm, and finally, you can use it on Nikon 1 one inch sensor CX cameras, where it becomes equivalent to 810mm. Read more about using this lens as an ultra long 810mm tele lens here.

Also in the table below, you'll find the older Olympus 300mm f/2.8 Four Thirds tele lens. This can be used with an adapter on Micro Four Thirds cameras. Note, however, that the Olympus E-M1 is the only M4/3 camera to autofocus this lens reliably, as it is, at the time of writing, the only M4/3 camera to use Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) technology.

Lens	Olympus 300mm f/4 IS PRO	Nikon 300mm f/4E PF VR	Olympus 300mm f/2.8 Four Thirds
Price	EUR2600/US$2500	US$2000	US$7000
Equivalent focal length	600mm	450mm (on DX), 810mm (on CX)	600mm
Minimum focus distance	1.4m	1.4m	2.4m
Length	227mm	148mm	281mm
Diameter	93mm	89mm	129mm
Filter thread	77mm	77mm	NA
Weight	1478g	755g	3290g
Optical image stabilization	Yes	Yes	No

Looking at this comparison, the Olympus lens does look quite large, heavy, and expensive, compared with the similarly specified Nikon lens.

Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3 Power OIS

The upcoming Lumix lens has a maximum equivalent reach of 800mm. This makes it natural to compare with the Nikon 1 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6, which corresponds to 190-810mm on the Nikon 1 system. It is seen below together with the previous longest Lumix lens, the Lumix G 100-300mm f/4-5.6:

Nikon 1 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 (left) and Lumix G 100-300mm f/4-5.6 (right)

The Lumix G 100-300mm is not a bad lens, but somewhat uninspiring, perhaps, in the long end. See my review here.

The Nikon lens, on the other hand, is very good. It is currently the best choice for those who want a compact, ultra long lens, in my opinion. Read about my experience here.

Lens	Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3 Power OIS	Nikon 1 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6	Lumix G 100-300mm f/4-5.6
Price	US$1800	US$1000	US$500
Equivalent focal length	200-800mm	190-810mm	200-600mm
Minimum focus distance	1.3m	1.0m	1.5m
Length	172mm	108mm	126mm
Diameter	83mm	73mm	74mm
Filter thread	72mm	62mm	67mm
Weight	985g	560g	520g
Optical image stabilization	Yes	Yes	Yes

Again, just like with the new Olympus lens, Panasonic's lens does look quite large, heavy and expensive, compared with the competition.

One quite good news about the Lumix/Leica 100-400mm f/4-6.3 is that the maximum aperture remains quite large through the focal length. Here is a comparison of the three lenses above:

This tells us that the Lumix/Leica 100-400mm f/4-6.3 OIS has a maximum aperture of f/5.6 at 300mm (600mm equivalent), which is better than I had expected. Most ultra long lenses like this close down quite fast as you zoom in, like the Nikon lens above.

Conclusion

I think these lenses will be popular among people who are already fans of the Micro Four Thirds system. However, with the specifications and prices, I have a hard time seeing that they can bring a lot of new people into the system.

Micro Four Thirds has never been the first choice for wildlife and sports photographers, and for good reasons: While the autofocus has become very fast for non-moving subjects, it is nowhere near the performance expected by professionals for continuously moving subjects.

With no M4/3 cameras using PDAF technology with M4/3 sensors, I don't think this is going to change yet. The CDAF technology is still not good enough, even if Panasonic is developing their "Depth From Defocus" (DFD) image processing.

Professionals and enthusiasts go with what they know works, and for sports and wildlife, Micro Four Thirds does not so much have a proven track record.

Panasonic is introducing a technology to scan through a range and capture images at different focus distances ("Post Focus"). This may help for some static subjects, but for sports, it doesn't help at all.

You will get a lot more "bang for the buck" by going for Nikon or Canon here, rather than the new Micro Four Thirds lenses.

I think these lenses can allow Micro Four Thirds to get a presence in a new market segment, but probably at a rather high initial development cost.

Micro Four Thirds is a very good system for ultra wide angle and fisheye lenses. See this comparison, for example. But for ultra long lenses, I think it is not the best system today.