20mm F1.7 Pancake lens -is- fairly noisy

The white balance might have been off in some of those clips including this one so I took it offline. I do not want to spread misleading examples.
 
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The white balance might have been off in some of those clips including this one so I took it offline. I do not want to spread misleading examples.

oh boy, that´s not at all was I was going for!

by "bright" I meant "looks like a lot of light comes in through your pancake lens".

and as I saw as mentioned the fixed pattern noise lurk through here and there I just wanted to know the settings to do a comparison with my gh1 (which I suspect of having way to much fpn lately).

I don´t have the pancake but I´d think a comparison with another F1,7 lens at same ISO and shutter should be easy to do. All I need to find is a similarily lightened street at night which is no problem.
 
I was just explaining why I took it off. I never really tried answering you. Most of the clips were at 400 ISO and f.1.7. One of the clips were in auto and I'm not really sure about that clip.
 
is this a *must have* lens for GH1 or are there better/cheaper alternatives (lens + mount) ?
 
is this a *must have* lens for GH1 or are there better/cheaper alternatives (lens + mount) ?

I'm curious about this too. I have the Canon FD mount + FD 50mm f/1.4 but with the crop factor it's more like a semi-telephoto! I'm looking for a nice wide to go along with the 50.
 
I'm curious about this too. I have the Canon FD mount + FD 50mm f/1.4 but with the crop factor it's more like a semi-telephoto! I'm looking for a nice wide to go along with the 50.

The Canon FD 24mm f2 lens is optically fantastic, one of the best FD lenses ever produced. But they still go for about $250 - $300. FOV is 48mm equivalent on 35mm. They pop up on occasion on ebay.

You might also want to look for a Kiron 28mm f2 lens in FD mount. Comes to about a 56mm FOV equivalent, and an excellent performer on the GH1. They go for only about $80 - $100.

I've got both those lenses along with the pancake, and they're both great (especially for video), but the 20mm 1.7 is the clear winner for clarity, sharpness & contrast. I would say that it is a must have for m4/3 users.
 
Got mine today. This is a very nice lens. ISO 400 is all i need. I would AF lock to minimize hunting. Perfect combo for GH1. I don't think i'll ever take off this lens. Or need anymore cameras.
 
Camera Expert, so you posted at 11:50pm Thurs. - I clicked on the link at 6:30am Fri. and Vimeo says they're about ready to start converting? And you're a Plus member? That's not cool. How many hours long is your clip? :)
 
Camera Expert, so you posted at 11:50pm Thurs. - I clicked on the link at 6:30am Fri. and Vimeo says they're about ready to start converting? And you're a Plus member? That's not cool. How many hours long is your clip? :)
I complained to them last night that of the 3 recent videos that I uploaded, one of them doesn’t want to start converting. It manually got pushed through a few hours ago and it’s finally working. At least they resolved it although it did take a while.
 
Aperture of f1.7 + ISO of 100 + 1,600 shutter + bad weather = not bad
I shot this in the Creative Movie mode with Aperture Priority enabled.
I do wonder if it probably would have looked better if the Shutter was slightly lowered. Maybe Panasonic does increase the shutter slightly too high in Aperture Priority.
http://vimeo.com/7239851

I guess where getting a bit off topic to the original discussing in this thread.
 
Aperture of f1.7 + ISO of 100 + 1,600 shutter + bad weather = not bad
I shot this in the Creative Movie mode with Aperture Priority enabled.
I do wonder if it probably would have looked better if the Shutter was slightly lowered. Maybe Panasonic does increase the shutter slightly too high in Aperture Priority.
http://vimeo.com/7239851

I guess where getting a bit off topic to the original discussing in this thread.

Hey,

on vimeo you posted that the aperture was 1,7 but your video is almost everywhere in focus. did I miss something?
 
I have one and i agree with you. I guess the depth of field is less shallow due to the 2x crop factor of the u4/3's sensor.

That doesn't effect DOF....what you might be trying to say is that despite it's 40mm effective FOV it is still 20mm lens and therefore has deeper depth of field thanks to its wide focal length.
 
ok, thanks. I just expected a narrower depth of field at F1.7, that´s all.

This has to do with hyperfocal distance. If the gull was 20 ft. away and that's what you focused on with a 20mm at 1.7, everything from 5.5 ft. in front of the bird to 12.4 ft, behind him would be in focus. However, if you focused at the hyperfocal distance of 52.1 ft, the DOF would extend from 26.05 ft. to infinity.

It's just natural to assume Camera Expert focused on the bird since that seems to be the main focal point. I don't know how far away that gull was or what Camera Expert had focused on, but it's entirely possible that focus had been previously set for something else (further away) and he just never bothered to focus on the bird because it already appeared to be in focus.

Here are some explanations of hyperfocal distance along with a couple of calculators:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/dof.shtml
http://www.dofmaster.com/hyperfocal.html
Calculators:
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html
http://www.panohelp.com/hyperfocaldistance.html (the GH1's Circle of Confusion is 0.015)

Hope this helps explain why DOF can sometimes be unexpected. Prior to running across the whole hyperfocal thing, I had the same misconceptions about how a fast lens wide-open would always result in a narrow DOF.
 
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