Olympus 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 Zuiko Digital

(From Olympus lens literature) Part of our renowned Digital Specific Lens (TM) line, the 14-54mm is a portable, high-quality Digital Zuiko wide-angle zoom that provides edge-to-edge sharpness and superb color reproduction. The fast f/2.8-3.5 aperture makes it ideal for low-light situations while rendering a bright viewfinder image in the camera for easy focus and composition.

Since Olympus digital SLR cameras employ the four-thirds imaging sensor, any lens attached to the body will have an effective focal length (in 35mm terms) of double the listed length. Thus, for this particular lens, it will exhibit an effective focal length of 28-108mm. The lens takes 67mm filters, and comes with a petal-shaped lens hood. It’s available now for around $450.

This lens isn’t a “constant” lens, in that as you increase the focal length, the maximum aperture size decreases. The following table reflects the change in maximum aperture:

These figures just correspond to the focal lengths marked on the lens; in actual usage, the widest aperture adjusts quite precisely in conjunction with the focal length setting. As you zoom in and out at the widest aperture, you can see the aperture changing in one-tenth increments.

Sharpness

The Zuiko digital lens design seeks to improve image clarity by aligning the light rays as they approach the sensor; in the case of the 14-54mm, this concept succeeds extremely well. On most wide-angle lenses, corner softness is the most common issue, but even at the widest and fastest configuration of this lens (14mm at ƒ/2.8) corner softness is barely noticeable and the lens is very sharp. Stopped down to just ƒ/4, corner softness is negligible and sharpness is excellent across the frame.

On the telephoto end, the lens is not at its sharpest wide open at ƒ/3.5, but it is hard to find fault with the lens’ sharpness here – it barely exceeds 2 blur units on our scale from 1 to 12. Sharpness improves as the aperture is stopped down, and by ƒ/5.6 sharpness is uniformly excellent. Diffraction starts to set in around ƒ/16, with the worst results shown at ƒ/22; however, the worst from this lens is better than the best from others we’ve seen, with the image produced never exceeding 4 units on our blur scale.

Chromatic Aberration

If this lens has any faults, they might be apparent in its performance with regard to chromatic aberration. In the lab we do record CA when this lens is set to its widest angle, but even here the effect is not incredibly significant (you’ll see it if you zoom in, but on average print sizes, there aren’t enough pixels printed to show it). Chromatic aberration virtually disappears as you approach 35mm in focal length, and returns as you hit the telephoto end at 54mm. One note to the chromatic aberration in this lens is that it is fairly static across apertures – changing to a faster aperture is not going to produce more CA (but changing to a smaller aperture isn’t going to reduce it, either).

Shading (”Vignetting”)

The 14-54mm has excellent performance with regard to vignetting. It’s really only a factor when the focal length is set to a wider angle (17mm and below) and the aperture is set to anything faster than ƒ/4. Outside of these conditions, light falloff is negligible; in the worse case scenario, 14mm at ƒ/2.8, you’re looking at just over a half-stop differential in light in the corners. Happily, most imaging software can correct for shading issues.

Distortion

Distortion is handled excellently with this lens. Typical with wide-angle lenses, there is some barrel distortion when the lens is set to a wider angle (below 22mm), but even here, the maximum variation is less than 0.5%. Curiously, there is some slight pincushion distortion only at the mid-range level (25mm) but you’d have to look pretty closely at your images to detect it.

Autofocus Operation

The 14-54mm autofocuses quickly, but not as quietly as we would have liked. It’s not a subtle noise, but it’s a small price to pay for excellent autofocussing performance. Point-to-point focusing is very quick and the noise is not so obvious in these cases; it’s only when the lens racks through the entire focus range that the serious motor noise comes into play.

Macro

The focus range scale on the lens shows a closest-focus distance of 22 centimetres (just over 8.5 inches), and our results bear this out, providing satisfactory results for macro use. It’s worth noting that the close-focus range is taken from the image sensor, not the end of the lens, as this produces a practical close-focus range (from the far end of the lens) of just under 2 inches.

Bokeh

Click on these thumbnails for full-size samples:

54mm, ƒ/3.5

54mm, ƒ/8

54mm, ƒ/22

Build Quality and Handling

The 14-54mm is solidly built. It still seems to be finished with a fair number of plastic parts, but at 435 grams (just over 15 ounces), there’s a lot of glass and metal under the shell. The lens mount is metal, compared to the plastic of less expensive Olympus glass. The fit and finish of this lens is superb; there zoom and focus dials rotate with a velvety smoothness, and the textures have an excellent traction. Setting it apart from less expensive Olympus lenses is a distance scale.

Mounted on the E-510, the camera balances extremely well. The front filter doesn’t turn while focussing or zooming, and a quarter turn on the zoom dial covers the entire focal range.

Alternatives

Unforunately, your options are a bit limited with the Olympus lens system, as four-thirds system lenses are still relatively new and only Sigma is producing third-party lenses to fit.

Olympus 14-35mm f/2 ED SWD Zuiko Digital ~$?
At the time of this review, it’s not yet on the store shelves; for what would be a premium price, you probably won’t get much better quality than this 28-70mm 35mm-equivalent lens. It won’t zoom out quite as far, but with a constant ƒ/2 aperture, you won’t get a faster lens in this focal range.

Olympus 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 Zuiko Digital ~$139-200
This lens was the original kit lens for the Evolt E-330, which has arguably been replaced by the 14-42mm Zuiko. Corner softness is a problem with this lens, obvious at wide angles and apertures; chromatic aberration is also readily apparent until you zoom out further than 18mm. Vignetting and distortion are also worse, but not by much.

Olympus 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 Zuiko Digital ~$249
The original kit lens for the E-410 and E-510, this is the lens from which most Olympus dSLR users would be considering an upgrade. It’s less expensive, but in this case you do get what you pay for as the 14-42mm isn’t quite the wonder-lens with regard to sharpness, distortion and vignetting. It has a slightly better profile with regard to chromatic aberration, and it is much lighter (190g), but this shows off the fact that it isn’t made with the same attention to fit and finish as you find with the 14-54mm.

Panasonic 14-50mm f/2.8-3.5 ASPH Leica D VARIO-ELMARIT ~$900
With on-board stabilization and an aperture control ring on the lens, with 16 elements in 12 groups, this high-quality optic should be an excellent performer. Check this review from cameralabs.com for how the lens-based stabilization works on an Olympus E-510.

Sigma 18-50mm f/2.8 EX DC ~$109 (f/2.8: $419)
The only non-Olympus lens in this category, we haven’t yet tested it but it has received above-average user reviews. For the budget option, this could be a strong contender. Sigma also produces a constant ƒ/2.8 version of this lens, which fits the four-thirds lens system.

Conclusion

The 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 is the ultimate walk-around lens for the Olympus four-thirds system. While not as versatile as a superzoom (54mm isn’t very long, as far as telephoto lenses go, even with the 2x crop factor) the optical quality is truly remarkable. Combined with excellent resistance to distortion and shading, and a respectable chromatic aberration profile (you have to look hard to find CA in images produced by this lens), this lens does the job, and does more than well enough to justify the reasonable price demanded for it.

Sample Photos!

Sample photos are available of two laboratory test targets to help in our readers’ evaluation of the lenses we test. The VFA target should give you a good idea of sharpness in the center and corners, as well as some idea of the extent of barrel or pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration, while the Still Life subject may help in judging contrast and color. We shoot both images using the default JPEG settings and manual white balance of our test bodies, so the images should be quite consistent from lens to lens.

As appropriate, we shoot these with both full-frame and sub-frame bodies, at a range of focal lengths, and at both maximum aperture and f/8. For the “VFA” target (the viewfinder accuracy target from Imaging Resource), we also provide sample crops from the center and upper-left corner of each shot, so you can quickly get a sense of relative sharpness, without having to download and inspect the full-res images. To avoid space limitations with the layout of our review pages, indexes to the test shots launch in separate windows.

To see the sample shots from this lens captured with this lens on our test body, just click on either of the thumbnails below, and scroll as needed in the window that appears.

Still Life shot

VFA target