Olympus 30mm f/3.5 Macro Lens Review: A compact, highly affordable entry into the macro world
posted Monday, January 9, 2017 at 12:20 PM EDT
During Photokina 2016, Olympus announced the 30mm f/3.5 Macro M.Zuiko Digital ED lens, their second dedicated macro lens for Micro Four Thirds after the 60mm f/2.8 M.Zuiko Digital ED -- which was coincidentally announced during Photokina four years prior. We have now tested the new macro lens and published our Olympus 30mm f/3.5 Macro Lens Review.
How did the $300 lens perform in our testing? While you'll need to read our full review for all the information and test results, we found that the lens is indeed very sharp, even when shot wide-open. Of course, when shooting macro photography, a lens is rarely shot at its maximum aperture, and the lens offers excellent results from edge-to-edge stopped down, as well. The lens offers good performance with vignetting and captures images without noticeable distortion, but it does struggle with chromatic aberration.
What about macro performance? The lens can focus as close as four inches (9.5 centimeters), which offers a 1.25x magnification rating when mounted on an MFT camera (although Olympus says it is equivalent to a 2.5x magnification in 35mm format), which is quite impressive. To read more about the lens’s performance, build quality and its competition, read the full review and be sure to check out a selection of real-world gallery images.