Barry_Green
Moderator
I've got a few of these, what I consider a decent-range set, that I use for my GH2 and AF100; thought I'd give a little bit of a rundown on them in case anyone's interested...
7-14 f/4.0 wide-angle zoom
Love it love it love it love it love love love love love love this lens. This is probably my favorite Lumix lens of the bunch. It's soooooooooo friggin' wide. It's equiv. to a 17-35 on a movie camera, or a 14-28 on a stills camera. It's sharp, it's wide, and it's wide. Focus is slick and smooth, zoom action is slick and smooth. The distortion when you get really close is just too much fun, but it's also a rectilinear lens (no barrel distortion, no fisheye!) more like the Arri 8mm Ultra Prime. Because of the rectilinear nature you do have to watch out in the corners as things do get stretchy. It's a special-purpose lens, because it is so wide, but if you need a wide zoom, this is a great one. And it's quite small so it's totally reasonable on the GH2. 10/10.
20mm f/1.7 pancake
This is a great lens. This is a really great little lens. It's affordable, it's TINY, it's super-sharp, and it's fast (f/1.7 makes it 2.75 stops faster than the 14-140 when set to 20mm; that means it can deliver equivalent brightness in 1/7th as much light!) It's got an extremely usable field of view, for a prime -- it's about equiv. to a 24mm lens on a movie camera, or a 40mm lens on a full-frame stills camera. I really, really like this lens on the GH2. On the AF100, it's not quite as appealing, I must say. It's so tiny, it looks silly, and the manual focus isn't really that great, and for video autofocus it's not that good -- it's slow and noisy. But the tiny size just mates so well with the GH2 and really feels like a natural fit. If you're getting a 14-140 for general purposes and you need a faster lens on occasion, the 20mm is a great fit for that. I like it a lot, it's a good default standard lens. 9/10.
14-140 f/4-5.8 HD zoom
On the surface, this lens seems to offer it all. It's got a great 10x zoom range, from wide angle to really good telephoto (equiv. to 17-170 on a movie camera, or 28-280 on a "full frame" stills camera). It has optical image stabilization, which is just absolutely vital when shooting handheld at longer focal lengths. It's got chromatic aberration compensation to get rid of the purple/green fringing other lenses may exhibit. It's got barrel distortion correction for sharp square vertical lines when at wide angle. Like all the Lumix lenses, it communicates back to the AF100 to tell the AF100 its zoom and focus positions, so you always know exactly where you are focusing at or what zoom position you're at. And the zoom action is soooo much better than the 100-300; I didn't realize how nicely the zoom works on the 14-140 until I got the 100-300. And it's the only lens available for any still camera or large-sensor videocamera that you can get for m43 that does video-style silent fast autofocus. Overall, this lens really does do everything.
So why are you sensing a "but" coming on? Well, because after the latest firmware update, I'm finding it not quite "all that". I used to think it was all that and a bag of chips; now I think it doesn't get the chips. It's still the one lens that, if you could only get one lens, this would be the one I'd recommend. However...
It's slow. We know that; it only opens to f/4 at the max, and over much of the range it's slower than that. You can't get the super-shallow DOF out of this lens, that you can out of the 20mm pancake (or, especially, the Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 lens!) It's not the best for shooting indoors, because it's slow -- you have to gain up a stop to get the camera to be on par with an HVX200, for example; Jim Brennan reports that an AF100 w/14-140 at 800 ISO is about equiv. to an HVX200 at 0dB using its built-in lens. That's not bad, but ... well, it's 800 ISO. If you want killer low light performance, you could get the same or even better brightness out of 200 ISO if you used the Olympus f/2.0 lenses, for example. In low light, the 14-140 most definitely isn't the brightest star of the bunch.
Second, it makes a great match size-wise to an AF100, but it's a bloated massive huge thing to use as a walking-around lens on a GH2. I spent all day with the lens on the GH2 at the zoo, and I love the range -- it's got a GREAT range, especially with the GH2's ETC mode. But dang if the lens isn't as big as the whole camera. Seems pathetic to be whining about size when we're talking about such a tiny camera and relatively small lens, but I'm just putting it out there -- the pancake is so sleek and just feels like it's "perfect" for the GH2, whereas the 14-140 makes the whole package just a whole lot bulkier. With the pancake, the GH2 is practically a point-and-shoot; with the 14-140, it's practically a 5DMkII. Not quite as bulky, but almost. That doesn't have to be a negative, but I'm pointing it out.
Third, while it does do video-style autofocus, it hunts like a bugger. Now, this is kind of a case of the guys on Survivor complaining about the flavor of the rice they get to eat -- if you want autofocus on an AF100, this is the ONLY lens in the world (right now) that does it video-style, so -- beggars can't be choosers. But, if you're expecting it to act just like the instant-autofocus on a Canon XF, or like regular autofocus on an HPX170... it isn't quite there. It's decent, but ... well, yeah, that's it. It's decent.
Also, I'm not 110% sure on this, but I think the most recent firmware updates may have changed one of my favorite behaviors on this lens. In prior versions, this lens on the AF100 pretty much acted as a parfocal -- you could zoom in, set focus, and zoom out, and it'd hold focus exactly. Now, either I was blind and didn't notice this before, or the latest firmware update has changed this, because there are some scenarios where it doesn't quite do it perfectly. I can set focus to 8 feet, zoom out, and focus will now be reading out as 7.7 feet (or whatever). And the iris will do the same thing -- zoom in, set it to f/9.0, zoom out, and i might read f/10. That's only a difference of 1/5 of an f-stop so it's not a really big deal, but ... it's annoying.
Lastly, the iris response is really slow. I think it's pretty slow on most of the Lumix lenses, but I really notice it on the 14-140, maybe because I expect more out of the 14-140. I want the 14-140 to turn the AF100 into a functional facsimile of a regular ENG-style videocamera. And ... it just isn't quite there. It's the best we've got, yes, but the iris response is really slow; autoiris response is chunky (noticeable brightness changes) and if you use a remote like the FoXi to change the iris quickly, you'll see that it can take a couple of seconds for the iris to "catch up" to you.
So -- overall, I still think that if you could only get one lens for an AF100, this would be the one. It does everything -- it just doesn't do everything brilliantly. But it does things no other lens does at all, so if you have a choice of "this one does it pretty well" vs. "those ones don't do it at all"... the 14-140 remains the only game in town. Overall rating: 7/10 unless you NEED what it does, in that case 8/10.
100-300 f/4-5.6 zoom
I like this lens a LOT. This is a great lens. It's a special-purpose lens, in terms of that it's so telephoto you're not going to want this as your only walking-around lens, but if you need what this lens does, it does it very well. You can shoot the moon, full-frame, with this lens! It's sharp, it's decently fast for its range, and when you combine it with the ETC on the GH2, it's practically a telescope. And the OIS works really well, and you NEED a good OIS when you're working with a CMOS camcorder at telephoto lengths.
For wildlife, I love this lens. Might even love love this lens. Heck, yeah, let's say it, I love love love this lens for wildlife. Paired with a GH2, it's a dream combo. You get the equivalent of a 2,340 mm lens (when shooting 720p ETC mode) with very minor jello (because the GH2's jello in 720p ETC is almost nonexistent) and the OIS removes the rest of the wobble. I mean, don't get me wrong, you need a tripod, but a regular CMOS camcorder with no OIS shooting at these ranges is going to be a wobbly mess even on a tripod; with the GH2/720/ETC/OIS it's easy to get super-stable, super-extreme mega-telephoto shots. This lens pairs incredibly well with the GH2 to make it a formidable wildlife camera. With/without ETC, it ranges from the "full frame" equivalent of 100mm-2340mm, at f/4-f/5.6, in a lens that costs $599 MSRP and weighs barely over one pound. How can you beat that? It's insane. And it autofocuses, and it has chromatic aberration compensation, and it's reasonably fast, and it's sharp. I compared it on the AF100 against my old Zeiss Pentacon Six 300mm f/4 lens, and the Lumix was dramatically sharper (not to mention tiny, and a zoom, and autofocus, and has OIS). It's so much better that I'm dumping the 300mm Zeiss now.
Drawbacks? The zoom action is horrible. Ugh. Made me appreciate the comparative slickness of the 14-140 and the nice smoothness of the 7-14. You will not be zooming during a shot with this lens! It's noisy, it has a bit of stickiness halfway through the range, and ... well, it's just not all that smooth. I hate the zoom action on this lens. But, at least it has a zoom, unlike my 300mm Zeiss, so... we're back to beggars and choosers.
On the AF100, you don't get quite all the same awesomeness out of it that you do on the GH2, because the AF100 doesn't have the ETC mode (so you don't get the mega-zoom 2340mm mode, and you don't get the benefit of the reduced rolling shutter that ETC mode has). But, the AF100's already got much better rolling shutter performance in 24p than the GH2 does, so ... it's still pretty good on the AF100. The range is a long telephoto; it's equiv to
120-360 on a movie camera, or 200-600 on a full-frame stills camera. But considering the closest you could get to this on a stills camera would be the Canon 100-400 f/4.5-f/5.6, the Lumix is (in terms of relative field of view) 50% more tele, 1/3 the price, and 1/3 the weight. For some folks that may more than make up for it having a lousy zoom action or whatever other shortcomings it might have in comparison. Yes the lens is huge on the GH2, but for wildlife I don't think that's an issue; wildlife shooters are used to long lenses. And compared to what "full frame" stills shooters are used to, they'll think the Lumix 100-300 is tiny; it's only five and a half inches long and 2.75" in diameter. It may feel big on a GH2, but it's right-sized for an AF100 and it's tiny for such a massive field of view.
This would be a special-purpose lens for an AF100, and in that context I'd give it a 7/10. But for a GH2 wildlife shooter, it's the bomb diggity, and for that user I'd give it an 11/10.
Note: the benefits of chromatic aberration compensation and barrel distortion correction won't apply to all cameras that these lenses could be used on. The lenses communicate this data to the camera body, but it's up to the camera body to work with that data to perform the appropriate digital corrections. In dpreview's tests, when these kinds of lenses are used on Olympus m43 bodies, the corrections aren't done; Olympus apparently doesn't have the hardware in their bodies to deal with it (but they have in-body image stabilization, so... there's always a tradeoff). On the GH1/GH2/AF100, those cameras do take advantage of the lens data and their processors do correct out the chromatic aberrations and the barrel distortion. I would guess that most if not all Lumix cameras do too, but I don't know.
I don't have any experience with any other Lumix lenses and so cannot compare them or answer questions about them. I bought all these from B&H and PanasonicDirect.com because I wanted a complete set of lightweight autofocusing color-matched lenses for the GH2, and I'm pretty happy (to thrilled) with them. Just passing on that info to anyone who was considering these lenses for either of these cameras.
Edit 1/19/11: I've just finished a separate article on another Lumix lens. Go to this link for an article on using the Lumix 3D lens on the AF100 and GH2!
7-14 f/4.0 wide-angle zoom
Love it love it love it love it love love love love love love this lens. This is probably my favorite Lumix lens of the bunch. It's soooooooooo friggin' wide. It's equiv. to a 17-35 on a movie camera, or a 14-28 on a stills camera. It's sharp, it's wide, and it's wide. Focus is slick and smooth, zoom action is slick and smooth. The distortion when you get really close is just too much fun, but it's also a rectilinear lens (no barrel distortion, no fisheye!) more like the Arri 8mm Ultra Prime. Because of the rectilinear nature you do have to watch out in the corners as things do get stretchy. It's a special-purpose lens, because it is so wide, but if you need a wide zoom, this is a great one. And it's quite small so it's totally reasonable on the GH2. 10/10.
20mm f/1.7 pancake
This is a great lens. This is a really great little lens. It's affordable, it's TINY, it's super-sharp, and it's fast (f/1.7 makes it 2.75 stops faster than the 14-140 when set to 20mm; that means it can deliver equivalent brightness in 1/7th as much light!) It's got an extremely usable field of view, for a prime -- it's about equiv. to a 24mm lens on a movie camera, or a 40mm lens on a full-frame stills camera. I really, really like this lens on the GH2. On the AF100, it's not quite as appealing, I must say. It's so tiny, it looks silly, and the manual focus isn't really that great, and for video autofocus it's not that good -- it's slow and noisy. But the tiny size just mates so well with the GH2 and really feels like a natural fit. If you're getting a 14-140 for general purposes and you need a faster lens on occasion, the 20mm is a great fit for that. I like it a lot, it's a good default standard lens. 9/10.
14-140 f/4-5.8 HD zoom
On the surface, this lens seems to offer it all. It's got a great 10x zoom range, from wide angle to really good telephoto (equiv. to 17-170 on a movie camera, or 28-280 on a "full frame" stills camera). It has optical image stabilization, which is just absolutely vital when shooting handheld at longer focal lengths. It's got chromatic aberration compensation to get rid of the purple/green fringing other lenses may exhibit. It's got barrel distortion correction for sharp square vertical lines when at wide angle. Like all the Lumix lenses, it communicates back to the AF100 to tell the AF100 its zoom and focus positions, so you always know exactly where you are focusing at or what zoom position you're at. And the zoom action is soooo much better than the 100-300; I didn't realize how nicely the zoom works on the 14-140 until I got the 100-300. And it's the only lens available for any still camera or large-sensor videocamera that you can get for m43 that does video-style silent fast autofocus. Overall, this lens really does do everything.
So why are you sensing a "but" coming on? Well, because after the latest firmware update, I'm finding it not quite "all that". I used to think it was all that and a bag of chips; now I think it doesn't get the chips. It's still the one lens that, if you could only get one lens, this would be the one I'd recommend. However...
It's slow. We know that; it only opens to f/4 at the max, and over much of the range it's slower than that. You can't get the super-shallow DOF out of this lens, that you can out of the 20mm pancake (or, especially, the Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 lens!) It's not the best for shooting indoors, because it's slow -- you have to gain up a stop to get the camera to be on par with an HVX200, for example; Jim Brennan reports that an AF100 w/14-140 at 800 ISO is about equiv. to an HVX200 at 0dB using its built-in lens. That's not bad, but ... well, it's 800 ISO. If you want killer low light performance, you could get the same or even better brightness out of 200 ISO if you used the Olympus f/2.0 lenses, for example. In low light, the 14-140 most definitely isn't the brightest star of the bunch.
Second, it makes a great match size-wise to an AF100, but it's a bloated massive huge thing to use as a walking-around lens on a GH2. I spent all day with the lens on the GH2 at the zoo, and I love the range -- it's got a GREAT range, especially with the GH2's ETC mode. But dang if the lens isn't as big as the whole camera. Seems pathetic to be whining about size when we're talking about such a tiny camera and relatively small lens, but I'm just putting it out there -- the pancake is so sleek and just feels like it's "perfect" for the GH2, whereas the 14-140 makes the whole package just a whole lot bulkier. With the pancake, the GH2 is practically a point-and-shoot; with the 14-140, it's practically a 5DMkII. Not quite as bulky, but almost. That doesn't have to be a negative, but I'm pointing it out.
Third, while it does do video-style autofocus, it hunts like a bugger. Now, this is kind of a case of the guys on Survivor complaining about the flavor of the rice they get to eat -- if you want autofocus on an AF100, this is the ONLY lens in the world (right now) that does it video-style, so -- beggars can't be choosers. But, if you're expecting it to act just like the instant-autofocus on a Canon XF, or like regular autofocus on an HPX170... it isn't quite there. It's decent, but ... well, yeah, that's it. It's decent.
Also, I'm not 110% sure on this, but I think the most recent firmware updates may have changed one of my favorite behaviors on this lens. In prior versions, this lens on the AF100 pretty much acted as a parfocal -- you could zoom in, set focus, and zoom out, and it'd hold focus exactly. Now, either I was blind and didn't notice this before, or the latest firmware update has changed this, because there are some scenarios where it doesn't quite do it perfectly. I can set focus to 8 feet, zoom out, and focus will now be reading out as 7.7 feet (or whatever). And the iris will do the same thing -- zoom in, set it to f/9.0, zoom out, and i might read f/10. That's only a difference of 1/5 of an f-stop so it's not a really big deal, but ... it's annoying.
Lastly, the iris response is really slow. I think it's pretty slow on most of the Lumix lenses, but I really notice it on the 14-140, maybe because I expect more out of the 14-140. I want the 14-140 to turn the AF100 into a functional facsimile of a regular ENG-style videocamera. And ... it just isn't quite there. It's the best we've got, yes, but the iris response is really slow; autoiris response is chunky (noticeable brightness changes) and if you use a remote like the FoXi to change the iris quickly, you'll see that it can take a couple of seconds for the iris to "catch up" to you.
So -- overall, I still think that if you could only get one lens for an AF100, this would be the one. It does everything -- it just doesn't do everything brilliantly. But it does things no other lens does at all, so if you have a choice of "this one does it pretty well" vs. "those ones don't do it at all"... the 14-140 remains the only game in town. Overall rating: 7/10 unless you NEED what it does, in that case 8/10.
100-300 f/4-5.6 zoom
I like this lens a LOT. This is a great lens. It's a special-purpose lens, in terms of that it's so telephoto you're not going to want this as your only walking-around lens, but if you need what this lens does, it does it very well. You can shoot the moon, full-frame, with this lens! It's sharp, it's decently fast for its range, and when you combine it with the ETC on the GH2, it's practically a telescope. And the OIS works really well, and you NEED a good OIS when you're working with a CMOS camcorder at telephoto lengths.
For wildlife, I love this lens. Might even love love this lens. Heck, yeah, let's say it, I love love love this lens for wildlife. Paired with a GH2, it's a dream combo. You get the equivalent of a 2,340 mm lens (when shooting 720p ETC mode) with very minor jello (because the GH2's jello in 720p ETC is almost nonexistent) and the OIS removes the rest of the wobble. I mean, don't get me wrong, you need a tripod, but a regular CMOS camcorder with no OIS shooting at these ranges is going to be a wobbly mess even on a tripod; with the GH2/720/ETC/OIS it's easy to get super-stable, super-extreme mega-telephoto shots. This lens pairs incredibly well with the GH2 to make it a formidable wildlife camera. With/without ETC, it ranges from the "full frame" equivalent of 100mm-2340mm, at f/4-f/5.6, in a lens that costs $599 MSRP and weighs barely over one pound. How can you beat that? It's insane. And it autofocuses, and it has chromatic aberration compensation, and it's reasonably fast, and it's sharp. I compared it on the AF100 against my old Zeiss Pentacon Six 300mm f/4 lens, and the Lumix was dramatically sharper (not to mention tiny, and a zoom, and autofocus, and has OIS). It's so much better that I'm dumping the 300mm Zeiss now.
Drawbacks? The zoom action is horrible. Ugh. Made me appreciate the comparative slickness of the 14-140 and the nice smoothness of the 7-14. You will not be zooming during a shot with this lens! It's noisy, it has a bit of stickiness halfway through the range, and ... well, it's just not all that smooth. I hate the zoom action on this lens. But, at least it has a zoom, unlike my 300mm Zeiss, so... we're back to beggars and choosers.
On the AF100, you don't get quite all the same awesomeness out of it that you do on the GH2, because the AF100 doesn't have the ETC mode (so you don't get the mega-zoom 2340mm mode, and you don't get the benefit of the reduced rolling shutter that ETC mode has). But, the AF100's already got much better rolling shutter performance in 24p than the GH2 does, so ... it's still pretty good on the AF100. The range is a long telephoto; it's equiv to
120-360 on a movie camera, or 200-600 on a full-frame stills camera. But considering the closest you could get to this on a stills camera would be the Canon 100-400 f/4.5-f/5.6, the Lumix is (in terms of relative field of view) 50% more tele, 1/3 the price, and 1/3 the weight. For some folks that may more than make up for it having a lousy zoom action or whatever other shortcomings it might have in comparison. Yes the lens is huge on the GH2, but for wildlife I don't think that's an issue; wildlife shooters are used to long lenses. And compared to what "full frame" stills shooters are used to, they'll think the Lumix 100-300 is tiny; it's only five and a half inches long and 2.75" in diameter. It may feel big on a GH2, but it's right-sized for an AF100 and it's tiny for such a massive field of view.
This would be a special-purpose lens for an AF100, and in that context I'd give it a 7/10. But for a GH2 wildlife shooter, it's the bomb diggity, and for that user I'd give it an 11/10.
Note: the benefits of chromatic aberration compensation and barrel distortion correction won't apply to all cameras that these lenses could be used on. The lenses communicate this data to the camera body, but it's up to the camera body to work with that data to perform the appropriate digital corrections. In dpreview's tests, when these kinds of lenses are used on Olympus m43 bodies, the corrections aren't done; Olympus apparently doesn't have the hardware in their bodies to deal with it (but they have in-body image stabilization, so... there's always a tradeoff). On the GH1/GH2/AF100, those cameras do take advantage of the lens data and their processors do correct out the chromatic aberrations and the barrel distortion. I would guess that most if not all Lumix cameras do too, but I don't know.
I don't have any experience with any other Lumix lenses and so cannot compare them or answer questions about them. I bought all these from B&H and PanasonicDirect.com because I wanted a complete set of lightweight autofocusing color-matched lenses for the GH2, and I'm pretty happy (to thrilled) with them. Just passing on that info to anyone who was considering these lenses for either of these cameras.
Edit 1/19/11: I've just finished a separate article on another Lumix lens. Go to this link for an article on using the Lumix 3D lens on the AF100 and GH2!
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