35mm vs 4/3 lens question

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dv416

Well-known member
if you put a 50mm (35mm) lens on a gh1, would it look the same as if oyu put a 50mm (4/3) lens on it?

my guess is that it would look the same, in terms of zoom. both would have a 100mm 35 equivalent. but the 50mm/35 lens would have the 35 depth of field and the 4/3 one would have 4/3 depth of field (slightly less, right?). the 4/3 would not be cropping the image, the 35 one would.

is this right?
 
If I set the GH1 kit lens to 50mm there's no difference in either crop nor DOF at the same aperture as with my Canon FD 50mm. Well, the FD has a somewhat nicer looking bokeh but the amount of defocus is the same.
 
The only 50mm 4/3 lens I know of is the Olympus-Zuiko 50mm f2 macro. I'm not an expert on Canon lenses, but I think the Oly 50mm is hard to beat. However, I'd make sure to see how well/if the auto-focus/AE works on the GH1 with the 50mm before buying it. It would be a waste of money if it only worked in manual.

If you're shooting still photography or live events, autofocus and auto exposure is a pretty cool thing to have, so I'd suggest the MICRO-4/3 Lumix 45mm f2.8 Macro instead of the standard 4/3 Olympus 50mm f2.0. It's insanely expensive in comparison to cheap manual Canon lenses, but worth every penny if you get paid for your work.

But if you're shooting "indie movies", you're good with the eBay Canon manual lenses IMHO (or whatever brand you like...personally I love my Olympus OM lenses...but don't like using them on my GH1).

And yeah, like the others said, a 50mm lens is a 50mm lens, whether is mounted to a 35mm SLR, a GH1, or the hood of your car. The GH1 is simply going to do a 2x crop on any lens you mount on it. It doesn't make a 50mm a 100mm lens, it just means you can't see the other half of the image you could have seen if it were mounted on a full frame camera....meaning your image will seem to have a deeper DOF.

That's the great thing about the Micro-4/3 lenses...they're designed with this crop factor in mind. The 45mm Lumix or the Oly 50mm were not designed as "standard" focal length lenses...they are telephoto/portrait/macro lenses for the 4/3 and Micro4/3 systems. The Lumix 20mm f1.7 kinda takes the place of the fast 50mm lens on a 35mm camera. Likewise, that's why the kit lens is 14-140....giving it a standard wide angle similar to 28mm on a 35mm camera.

Good luck!
 
dv416 said:
if you put a 50mm (35mm) lens on a gh1, would it look the same as if oyu put a 50mm (4/3) lens on it?
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It would look identical. 50mm is 50mm is 50mm, regardless of what format it was made for. A 50mm lens for a 35mm still camera, a 50mm lens for a medium-format still camera, a 50mm lens for a 35mm movie camera, a 50mm lens for a m4/3 camera, a 50mm lens for a Super16 movie camera -- any and all of them would look identical (in terms of DOF and FOV) when mounted on a m4/3 camera.

my guess is that it would look the same, in terms of zoom
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Correct.

but the 50mm/35 lens would have the 35 depth of field and the 4/3 one would have 4/3 depth of field (slightly less, right?)
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NO. They would be identical depth of field.
 
well now i'm a little confused about what the difference is between the two. i thought the 4/3 lenses were designed to take advantage of the smaller chip size. is there still cropping with a 4.3 lens then?
 
dv416 said:
well now i'm a little confused about what the difference is between the two. i thought the 4/3 lenses were designed to take advantage of the smaller chip size. is there still cropping with a 4.3 lens then?
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4/3 mount lenses are at focal lengths that pair well with a camera that has a 2x crop...i.e. a 4/3 camera. But a 20mm is lens is still a 20mm lens...whether it's on a GH1, a 5D, or being used as a gas cap on a 1982 Ford F150. What determines the image is the camera it is attached to...i.e. the GH1/MicroFourThirds will crop the image 2x.

That being said, 4/3 lenses are usually produced in focal lengths twice as wide as lenses designed for full frame/35mm cameras.

A wide angle lens on FF is typically 28mm.
A wide angle lens on Micro4/3 is 14mm (i.e. kit lens).
Standard on FF is typically a fast 50mm.
Standard on Micro4/3 is the 20mm f1.7.
Portrait/telephoto on FF could be a 90mm.
Portrait/telephoto/macro on Micro4/3 is the 45mm f2.8.

But all that matters is finding the lenses that work for your needs, whether they're old manual lenses made for FF/35mm cameras or the expensive digital lenses made for micro-4/3.
 
The 4/3 lenses will cover only the 4/3 sensor (~21mm diagonal). Hence they are smaller, cheaper to build. If you put the same lens on full 35mm camera (Leica M...) you might get some serious vignetting.
 
pix2pixels said:
The 4/3 lenses will cover only the 4/3 sensor (~21mm diagonal). Hence they are smaller, cheaper to build. If you put the same lens on full 35mm camera (Leica M...) you might get some serious vignetting.
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thats what i thought. how is it then, for example, that all 50mm lenses are the same, as people have explained above? is it just that the images produced would all LOOK the same on a gh1? that makes sense to me...
 
Yes, all the lenses would look the same when mounted on any one given camera.

The difference in lenses designed for a particular format is as pix2pixels said, it's in how big of an image circle the lens covers. A c-mount lens only covers a small circle, a 4/3 lens covers a much bigger circle, a 35mm cine lens covers a very slightly larger circle, and a 35mm still camera covers a much larger circle.

But if the lens covers the sensor, then they will all have the same field of view and DOF when mounted on any particular camera. You could pull a 50mm lens off of a massive 8x10 camera and mount it on the GH1, and it'll have the same field of view and DOF as a tiny 16mm c-mount lens would. But you couldn't put a 16mm c-mount lens on that 8x10 camera, because you'd end up with a frame that's 98% black, with only a tiny circle of illumination in the center.
 
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