"Home made" hood for the Lumix 20mm f/1.7 pancake

The Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 pancake is a brilliant lens, but it does not come with a lens hood. Flare is not a big issue with this lens, but a lens hood is still good for protecting the front element. Some people use UV protection filters for the same effect, however, adding another glass layer will reduce the image quality to some degree.

One option is to get a cheap third party hood designed for the Leica Summilux lens, to screw into the front 46mm filter thread. However, this hood adds some bulk to the lens, making it less compact. The compactness is one of the desirable features of the Lumix 20mm pancake in the first place.

In an attempt to find a low profile hood that looks more like the hood for the Pentax 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens, I bought a cheap 46mm to 37mm step down ring. The ring is essentially a short cylinder with 46mm threads on the outside, and 37mm threads on the inside.

The ring is made out of light metal, and is extruded on the rear side to save some weight:


Step up and step down rings should be used with care with the Lumix 20mm pancake. When powering down, the lens retracts the front assembly slightly into the chassis, which will jam and possibly damage the focus mechanism if you attach a ring which is too wide. The following picture shows that this step down ring is not too wide, and can be safely used with the Lumix 20mm pancake lens:


Looking at hoods, you will note that they are usually ribbed and matte on the inside. This is to avoid having light reflected into the lens. Since the inside of the step down ring is threaded, it already has the right shape. However, the metal is still a bit shiny. To make it more matte, I applied some matte black enamel paint on the inside threads. Wanting to retain the stealthy look of the lens, I also painted the front and the side of the ring:


Here is the lens with the "home made" hood attached. This hood does not cause any additional vignetting.


You will probably want to have a front lens cap as well, and you can get a 37mm cap which fits into the front threads of the step down ring. Both the step down ring and the front lens cap can be found on various auction sites.

Macro extension rings

Using macro rings has always been a cheap trick to improve the close focusing distance of a lens. You'll notice that when focusing from infinity to a closer distance, the lens elements usually move away from the camera and the sensor. Some exceptions from this are lenses with internal focusing, or back focusing.

So what happens if you move the lens even further from the camera than what's possible with the focus ring? It turns out that this gives you an even closer focus. So what a macro extension ring simply does, is allow you to mount the lens further from the sensor, translating the focus range of the lens so that it can be used for close up work.

There are no macro rings officially available for the Micro Four Thirds mount yet. However, when using legacy lenses on an adapter, there are a wide range of macro rings to try out. Here is a set of Nikon macro rings from Jessop:

These rings contain some mechanical coupling functions to allow for the aperture information to be transfered to the camera, and for the camera to automatically stop down the lens before taking a picture. However, these functions only work on AIS capable cameras. In today's Nikon lineup, only the top models have retained this functionality.
When using the rings on a crude adapter, you can certainly forget about this functionality. You'll need to focus using a large aperture, and then alter the aperture ring manually prior to pressing the shutter release, if you want to stop down the aperture.
The thickness of the rings are 13mm, 21mm, and 31mm. When stacked in different combinations, they can give these offset distances: 13mm, 21mm, 31mm, 34mm, 41mm, 52mm and 65mm.

Normally, these rings would go between the camera mount and the lens. When using an adapter, however, they go between the adapter and the lens, as in this picture:



A Nikon-Micro Four Thirds adapter (marked with "Nik-M4/3") is mounted to the Panasonic Lumix GH1 camera, and all the macro rings are stacked between the lens and the adapter. The lens is a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AIS. Here is a video showing how to attach the adapter and lens to the camera.

When using all the macro rings above, I took this picture of a measure band, to find the largest magnification. It was taken at 4/3 aspect ratio, in which case the active sensor is 18mm wide. Since the photographed item is 13mm wide, this gives an enlargement of 18:13, or 1.4:1. This could also be expressed as 1.4x.



For comparison, the Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 macro lens is capable 1:1 enlargement (1x), which means that the largest enlargement possible would have yielded 18mm of the measurement band. The macro rings and Nikkor 50mm lens can be used to make more enlargement than the dedicated Panasonic Leica macro lens.

Using the configuration above, with 65mm extension of the lens, I was able to take this close up picture:


I stopped down the aperture to f/8 for more depth of field.

For comparison, I photographed the same object using the Olympus Zuiko 50mm 1:2 macro lens. This is the closest picture I could take with the Olympus lens, also at f/8, and with an enlargement of approximately 1:2:



Macro rings for legacy mounts can be bought cheaply on various auction sites. There are also extension tubes and bellows, which are functionally similar, but more flexible in use. Another way to achieve closer focusing is to use a reverser ring, essentially a second lens mount to be screwed into the front lens filter thread. Using a reverser ring, the lens can be mounted reversed, in which case it can be used for macro. Lenses with a normal focal length are most commonly used this way.

Please note that macro lenses are special in that the lens formula is designed for close up photography. Using ordinary lenses on extension rings or bellows is not going to give as good results, since those lenses are not designed for close focusing.
Here is another example picture using the full 65mm macro ring extension:



For this picture of a garlic, I used f/22 to achieve enough depth of field. Using such a small aperture is going to give some blurring at pixel level due to diffraction. However, in this case, I valued more depth of field higher than some dullness at the highest magnification. The diffraction effect is barely visible at 100% view.

Micro Four Thirds lens lineup

Here is a summary of the lenses currently available, the known upcoming lenses, and some thoughts about future lens needs.

See also my Lens Buyers' Guide for Micro Four Thirds.

Market shares in Japan

Update: I have compiled newer statistics based on 2010, which supersede this material.

The Japan market shares are usually published every year. The figures comprise system camera units sold in Japan, mostly DSLRs, but the new Micro Four Thirds cameras are included as well. Only the 20 camera models with the largest sold volumes are included in the statistics. Other camera models, with less sales than these, are in the "Others" category.

I have concatenated the 2009 statistics (as at Dec 23rd) with the 2008 statistics, to be able to see the development better:



To make it easier to digest, I have split the figures into camera systems:



Before starting to comment on these figures, it is useful to note that the "Others" category is larger in 2009. This means that the volume of the smallest camera models has increased. We don't know how large the volume of various camera systems are here, but it is reasonable to guess that we would find some more Olympus, Sony and Nikon models in the 2009 "Others" category.

Canon has held their market share remarkably well. It is also worth noting that the full frame camera Canon 5D Mark II has a fairly high market share at 2.1%.

Nikon appears to have lost significant market shares, which must be very bad news for them. On the other hand, it is reasonable to guess that they have somewhat more volume in the "Others" category in 2009, with, e.g., the Nikon D300 and Nikon D700.

Sony must also be very disappointed, with less than 50% of the 2008 market shares. Again, though, they probably have more camera models in "Others" in 2009.

Pentax have succeeded with their strategy of launching entry models packed with features.

Olympus have only got one Four Thirds model in the 2009 list of the twenty most sold camera models, compared with three in the 2008 list. On the other hand, the E-P1 camera has been very popular, and made up for the lost Four Thirds units.

The Micro Four Thirds system has a total of 11.5% of the new sales in Japan in 2009, which I think is very remarkable. After all, the system was launched in 2008, and only two small players in the system camera market are behind it.

2007

For the fiscal year 2007 (actually only January through November), I could only find DSLR sales in summary form: Nikon 43.3%, Canon 39.9% and Pentax 6.3%, with the other producers being smaller.

2006

This table contains DSLR market shares in Japan by December 2006, for the largest ten camera models. I find it hard to believe that the D40 has already captured 15.5% of the total market in December 2006, since it was introduced the same month. However, this table might have been adjusted for the introduction time of each model.



Summary 2006-2009

All of this information can be summarized into one table, but please be aware that the numbers are not entirely comparable from year to year. Still, there is a trend to be seen.



2005-2009 from another source

BCNranking has published statistics for the three most sold brands within interchangeable lens cameras, meaning DSLRs and hybrid systems like Micro Four Thirds. This table shows the same trend as the other material:



We can see that while Canon has had a stable marked share the most recent years, they have actually had a significant decline when looking back five years. Also, Nikon had a good period around 2007, probably due to the launch of D40, but has not been able to sustain the growth.

Panasonic is the big surprise in 2009, with a third place due to the Micro Four Thirds bodies, probably mostly the G1, having been on the market for the whole 2009.

Lumix G 20mm f/1.7 pancake

The Panasonic Lumix G 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens was launched in the autumn 2009, and became an instant classic even before it was widely available.

It is interesting that Nikon has launched a lens with basically the same properties for Nikon Z: Nikon Z 40mm f/2. As this lens is a full format lens, it has the same field of view as a 20mm lens on Micro Four Thirds.

Most people who had a Micro Four Thirds camera by this time probably already owned a kit lens which covers the 20mm focal length, e.g., the Lumix 14-140mm, Lumix 14-45mm, or Olympus 14-42mm. So why add another lens in the same range?

There are several reasons why a lot of people like this lens. The focal length corresponds to 40mm on an old style 35mm film based camera, which can be considered as a slightly wide normal focal length. While there is nothing magical about this "normal" focal length, it is considered to give images that look normal to a human observer, in terms of perspective. It sits between wide angle and tele lenses, and while different photographers have different tastes, it remains a useful focal length for a lot of situations.

GH1 autofocus speed comparison

I have made some tests of the autofocus speed of the Panasonic Lumix GH1 camera with various lenses. The camera focused from infinity (the default position of the lens when powering down) to near the minimum focus distance, and I used a LEGO figure as the subject.

The test was done in indoor lightning, about EV6. The focus time is measured as the time from my finger presses the shutter button until the green focus confirmation light comes up in the display. The picture is taken immediately after focus is achieved, within one tenth of a second.

You will hear the shutter operating twice, since the camera was in multi exposure mode. I did confirm that all the images were indeed in focus, as is expected with a contrast detection autofocus system (CDAF).

Summary

Before going into the details, here is a quick summary

Lumix G 20mm	1.23 seconds
Lumix G HD 14-140 @ 18mm	0.53 seconds
Lumix G HD 14-140 @ 50mm	0.40 seconds
Lumix G HD 14-140 @ 140mm	1.63 seconds
Lumix G 45-200 @ 45mm	0.33 seconds
Lumix G 45-200 @ 100mm	0.36 seconds
Lumix G 45-200 @ 200mm	0.87 seconds
Olympus 4/3 9-18 @ 9mm	2.90 seconds
Olympus 4/3 9-18 @ 18mm	1.50 seconds

What is a bit surprising here, is that the 45-200mm lens is quicker than the HD 14-140mm. The latter is marketed as a very quick focusing lens, optimized for video, hence the HD designation. However, the 45-200mm lens has an advantage, since it's close focusing distance is 100cm, twice that of the HD 14-140mm. So when focusing from infinity to the minimum focusing distance, the HD 14-140mm has a longer way to travel.

Lens: Panasonic Lumix G 20mm f/1.7

Autofocus from infinity to 23cm: 1.23 seconds.
The minimum focus distance of the lens is 20cm.

Lens: Panasonic Lumix G 14-140mm HD f/4-5.8

Focal length 18mm (36mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/4.3:

Autofocus from infinity to 53cm: 0.53 seconds.
The minimum focus distance of the lens is 50cm.

Focal length 50mm (100mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/5.6:

Autofocus from infinity to 53cm: 0.40 seconds.
The minimum focus distance of the lens is 50cm.

Focal length 140mm (280mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/5.8:

Autofocus from infinity to 53cm: 1.63 seconds.
The minimum focus distance of the lens is 50cm.

The outcome for f=140mm deserves some more comments. As you can see from the video, the focus is hunting a bit before settling. I tried to redo this experiment several times, and found that the outcomes were very consistent. My speculation is that I have been operating close to the minimum focus distance, and that perhaps this distance is slightly longer in the tele setting. Indeed, moving the subject a bit further away from the camera gave focus speed consistent with 18mm and 50mm focal lengths.

I have also tested this with the firmware versions v1.2 and v1.3, and concluded that the issue has been fixed. The lightning was comparable, and even though I moved the figure around close to the minimum focus distance, I was not able to reproduce the focus hunting. Rather, the focus speed has improved a lot with the newer firmware, it seems.

Lens: Panasonic Lumix G 45-200mm f/4-5.6

Focal length 45mm (90mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/4.0:

Autofocus from infinity to 1m: 0.33 seconds.


Focal length 100mm (200mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/4.6:

Autofocus from infinity to 1m: 0.36 seconds.

Focal length 200mm (400mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/5.6:

Autofocus from infinity to 1m: 0.87 seconds.

Lens: Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm f/4-5.6

Note that this is not a Micro Four Thirds standard lens, but rather a lens for the Four Thirds DSLR system. To mount this lens on a Micro Four Thirds camera, you will need and adapter. I used with the adapter Panasonic DMW-MA1, but the Olympus MMF-1 adapter is functionally the same, and would have done the same job.

Not all Four Thirds lenses can autofocus on Panasonic Micro Four Thirds bodies, like the GH1. Here is a list.

Focal length 9mm (18mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/4:

Autofocus from infinity to 25cm: 2.90 seconds.
The minimum focus distance of the lens is 25cm.

Focal length 18mm (36mm in 35mm camera equivalent), f/5.6:

Autofocus from infinity to 25cm: 1.50 seconds.
The minimum focus distance of the lens is 25cm.

Conclusions

The autofocus speed of the Lumix G HD 14-140mm lens is the fastest in this comparison, which is as expected. The unexpected result in this context was the significantly slower autofocus speed at full tele, 140mm, however there is reason to believe that this was related to operating close to the minimum focus distance, as discussed above.

Just as with the superzoom above, the Lumix G 45-200mm features very impressive autofocus speed. The exception is at full tele, however, the speed at 200mm is still very good. The autofocus is virtually inaudible.

The Lumix G 20mm lens does indeed focus slower than the HD lens, and also somewhat more audibly.

Using autofocus with the Olympus 9-18mm Four Thirds lens is possible, but pretty slow. Especially at the wide angle setting. Focusing with this lens is also quite noisy. Taking pictures of moving subjects, e.g., children, with this lens could pose some difficulty with autofocus. In this case, it could be wise to prefocus, and set the camera to manual focus (MF) while composing the image. That way, you can take the picture nearly instantly when pressing the shutter, rather than having to wait some seconds for the autofocus to settle.

Lumix G 20mm	1.23 seconds
Lumix G HD 14-140 @ 18mm	0.53 seconds
Lumix G HD 14-140 @ 50mm	0.40 seconds
Lumix G HD 14-140 @ 140mm	1.63 seconds
Lumix G 45-200 @ 45mm	0.33 seconds
Lumix G 45-200 @ 100mm	0.36 seconds
Lumix G 45-200 @ 200mm	0.87 seconds
Olympus 4/3 9-18 @ 9mm	2.90 seconds
Olympus 4/3 9-18 @ 18mm	1.50 seconds

Mostly, you will not focus down to near the minimum focus limit of the lens, and so autofocus will usually be faster than these examples. The Olympus 9-18mm lens is a bit of an exception to this, however, as even focusing on a distant subject takes virtually as long time as focusing close.

Rumors say that future Panasonic models, like Lumix G2 and Lumix G10, will focus faster with Four Thirds lenses on an adapter.

Lumix G HD 14-140mm f/4-5.8 zoom lens

It is only natural that the Panasonic Lumix 14-140mm zoom lens is associated with the Panasonic Lumix GH1 camera: They were both only available as a kit for the first months following the launch in spring 2009. It was only after some time that the lens could be bought alone. From January 2010, the GH1 can be purchased as body only in the UK.

The lens has a 10x zoom ratio, and falls into the superzoom category. As is common for lenses of this type, it has a wide angle 28mm starting point (in 35mm camera equivalent terms), and goes all the way up to 280mm, which can be considered as a long telephoto lens.

This long zoom range comes at the cost of an aperture range which is not as impressive: f/4 at the wide angle, and f/5.8 at the long end.

One of the benefits of the Micro Four Thirds system is the compact size, and this benefit seems to be negated by the size of this lens. Even attaching it to the Panasonic GF1, the smallest M43 camera at the time of writing, gives a rather large and bulky package.

Since writing this, the lens has been superseded by the Lumix G HD 14-140mm f/3.5-5.6, which is smaller, lighter, and better in almost any way. I would certainly recommend that you consider the newer lens over the old one.

Aperture range

When looking at the aperture range of zoom lenses, it is common to observe the apertures of the end points. The aperture range, however, is far from linear. It increases faster than you might expect. The diagram below illustrates the aperture at various focal lengths (at 35mm camera equivalent) for the Lumix 14-140mm (blue) and the Nikon 18-200mm (red). As you can see, the Lumix lens has the smallest aperture range of the two, which we already knew, but in addition, the aperture closes down faster as the focal range increases, compared with the Nikon lens.

The 14-140mm lens has been criticized of being overly expensive, compared with similar lenses on the market. For example, the AF-S Zoom-Nikkor ED 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF DX VR, with an 11% longer zoom range, half a stop larger aperture in the wide end, and is less expensive. Canon has also got a lens with the same specifications as the Nikon, and at an even more attractive price point.

Some answers to these comments have been that the 14-140mm has some unique features not found on other lenses: It is optimized for video recording, and features low noise fast autofocus, and an aperture that can change almost steplessly (at 1/6 stop intervals), and almost inaudibly. The aperture is also marketed as being very precise. Another advantage compared with the Nikon and Canon lenses is that it is more compact, at about 15% shorter at the wide angle setting.

Bokeh

I have compared the bokeh of the lens with the Lumix 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens, with the 45mm f/2.8 macro and the 45-200mm f/4-5.6 zoom lenses and the Lumix 14mm f/2.5 lens. It is fair to say that the bokeh of the 14-140mm superzoom lens is not the best. It is a bit "dirty" and features some ringing. However, with the limited maximum aperture, you're not likely to see much out of focus rendering anyway, so this is not a problem. The 14-140mm zoom lens is also more prone to flare, probably due to the complicated construction featuring 17 lens elements in 13 groups.

Sharpness

When using this lens on the Lumix GH1 camera in auto mode, the camera will almost always choose the largest aperture. The exception is outdoors photography in generous sunshine at wide angle. It is good then, that the lens is pretty sharp from the fastest aperture over most of the zoom range. There is little need to stop down, unless you need a very sharp image.

The images are somewhat soft at full aperture in the telephoto focal lengths, though. However, there is seldom room for stopping down the aperture further when photographing at full tele extension, as the shutter speeds tend to be on the slower side already. If you're using a tripod, and are photographing non-moving subjects, you could benefit from using a somewhat smaller aperture.

Here is a sharpness comparison with four other lenses at 140mm. This lens does not perform the best here, and, generally, the newer Lumix G HD 14-140mm f/3.5-5.6 is better.

Here is an example image taken at full tele, 140mm. I used f/5.8, ISO 320, 1/200 second handheld. The picture features the author Erlend Loe.


Here is an example video recording, filmed handheld, at f=108mm (216mm film equivalent), 1/100 second shutter speed, f/5.8, ISO 400.

Introduction

This blog is a user's perspective on the Micro Four Thirds camera system. While I intend to keep the contents fact based, there are many areas where no objective truth is available, and hence there is room for different opinions and discussions. I would like to encourage you to contribute with your own experiences or opinions to this blog through the comments fields.

The Micro Four Thirds system was announced jointly by Olympus and Panasonic on August 5th, 2008. The first camera model was launched in November the same year.

Since this time, a number of cameras and lenses have become available for this system. While you can use Micro Four Thirds Olympus lenses with Panasonic cameras and vice versa, they have effectively made two different subsystems due to a different approach to optical image stabilization (OIS): Olympus cameras have images stabilization based on sensor shift inside the body, and no lens based OIS. Panasonic, on the other hand, do not use sensor shift image stabilization at all, but rather employ OIS through some lenses, by having some moving lens groups that are intended to cancel the negative effect of camera shake. These Panasonic lenses are denoted with the trademark "Mega O.I.S.".