Lumix 14mm f2.5, Olympus 17mm f2.8, or Canon FD 20mm F2.8 ?

S

sebek

Active member
I like to make short films and need a nice wide lens. I know the Lumix is very sharp but if I grade the footage, can I make it look more like a vintage lens? trying to decide if the wider 14mm will be as good as the canon fd at 20mm on my hacked GH1. How about the Olympus 17mm - is this a sharp lens or will it work well if I grade the footage to give it a more filmic look? Which one out of the three do you guys think is best for short film work and manual focus?
thx
 
I don't have a direct answer to your question, but what is known is that the m4/3 lenses add electronic sharpening to the image to varying degree to make them look nicer. They are not necessarily any sharper glass than the best vintage glass. For video the sharpening is baked in, so not that cinematic.

For cinematic look one would want to use the best vintage lens which matches the sensor resolution of the camera. That may not necessarily be Canon FD. Even then the camera still adds sharpening to the video, unfortunately. If you wanted to see how a HD video should look like filmed with a very sharp vintage lens in 4k RAW still images and all in-camera sharpening turned off (but some sharpening added in post), I have a video and some text about it: http://www.fourseasonshd.com/cgi-bin/csvsearch.pl?db=db1&tp=tp19&search=bluelight6

The video is how HD video should look like, if the camera allowed that quality to be recorded for video. Changing the 50 dollar Minolta lens to much more expensive lens will not guarantee any sharper images, because the sharp vintage lenses already seem to match the sensor resolution of the camera. But not all vintage lenses are that sharp.
 
I almost got the Olympus 17mm but, in reading, everybody said the 14mm was sharper. I finally found some 14mm cheap from HK and bought one. Here's an example of the 14mm f2.5 vs a canon 28mm f2.8.28mm.jpg14mm.jpg Both had the camera about the same distance, around a foot from the bottle cap. The cap with writing is the Canon, no writing is Panny 14mm. The canon has a little more vintage look, but those were shot months apart and the Canon was unhacked, the Panny has the 100mb Max Lat hack. No idea what iso or wb settings were, but both were wide open.

I'd still go for the panny... it's wider and faster, and considering the poor low light of the GH1, the faster the better. Filmic and cinematic get thrown around a lot, but if the story and acting sucks, nobody will care how good it looks.
 
I just tested the 14 mm and while it does appear very sharp at first, it adds a lot of in-camera sharpening thus creating more baked in video look. So I'm thinking you might have had similar results from the Canon if you put it through Unsharp mask a couple of times in Photoshop.

To compare the actual optical resolution would require taking 4k RAW images and turning any in-camera sharpening off from both lenses in the RAW processing program.
 
The Panasonic 14mm f2.5 has severe vignetting through at least f5.6. So it's not really as fast as its minimum fstop would indicate. The Olympus 12mm f2.0 is a much better lens in every way except size.
 
noirist said:
The Panasonic 14mm f2.5 has severe vignetting through at least f5.6. So it's not really as fast as its minimum fstop would indicate. The Olympus 12mm f2.0 is a much better lens in every way except size.
Click to expand...

I agree the Olympus 12mm is better....but you pay for it, near $800 vs $340 for the Panny 14mm and that's new prices. You can get the 14mm for under $200 now on ebay. I'd like the Oly but not at 4 times the price.

And where do you see vignetting? The pic I posted above is a frame grab from a 1080p video. It's wide open and looks pretty straight to me.
 
The vignetting is easiest to see if you take a picture of a uniformly color surface, like a white wall.
 
I never look at photo still quality when I'm shopping for video products. I'm sure you're right about the 12mm, but when I was shopping for my 14mm I saw a lot of olympus 17mm stills but no video and I knew not to base my purchase on that. I saw still of the stock 14-42mm that looked great, way better than any video I'd ever seen.

I'd like that Olympus 12mm, but not at that price and for video the Panny 14mm is the best bang for the buck and any errors with it will be virtually unnoticeable in video.
 
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