Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-50mm 1:3.5-6.3 EZ Lens - Black

Before I bought the lens, I had read many negative comments, pointing to the slow f/6.3 at the tele end. Yes, it's slow. But that's just one aspect of the lens.

Compared to other kit lens, you get a wider 24mm equivalent, weather-sealed body and the macro mode.

This lens reminds me of those lens you find on compact cameras. Wide and with macro. Now, it's available on the Micro Four Thirds, well, in a much larger body.

It's smaller than I expected. Its height is close to the zoomed out standard kit lens. This lens is fixed in size because the zooming is internal.

It's made of mainly hard plastic and weighs 212g. It's light. The standard kit from Olympus weighs 113g and Panasonic 165g.

It's great there are two colours for this lens. I bought the black one to go with my black camera. It looks good together. I think contrasting colours of the lens and camera will draw unwanted attention.

The lack of any lens information marking on the front is a nice design touch which makes it discreet.

Olympus still can't find it in themselves to include a lens hood. This one uses the Olympus LH-55B Lens Hood which is used with the Olympus 9-18mm f/4.0-5.6 lens

The focusing ring is smooth and nice to turn. This ring also functions as a zoom mode selector for macro mode, manual or electronic zoom.

The electronic zoom is well implemented and it's really made for video. The smooth zoom is great for video and the speed depends on how much you turn the ring. With manual zoom, I always get shaky video when zooming, but not so with the electronic zoom. It's a big plus here.

Autofocus is instant and silent.

Manual focus has an excellent, as usual, focus-by-wire implementation.

As for image quality, I felt it was good enough. Colours are nice. It's not as sharp as the 12mm prime, but it's not far off. At the 50mm end, it's sharp, well, it's shooting at f/6.3 after all.

As this isn't really considered a fast lens. It's good for outdoor use and have limited indoor application unless you're shooting at 12mm which is at f/3.5. Actually at 12mm, you should be able to get a sharp photo at 1/30s comfortably. Long end is f/6.3 so a firm hand and sometimes high ISO is needed.

The macro mode is extremely convenient. Especially useful for closeups like when you want to capture details of small items, e.g. shoot some products. The macro mode focal length is fixed at 43mm and aperture starts at f/6.0. It's not much of an issue here because for macro photos, the aperture has to be smaller for a deeper depth of field.

Macro's closest focusing distance is 20cm. Magnification is 0.72x. It's able to capture really fine details. I took a photo of a watercolor brush and can see every single strand of hair clearly defined.

Chromatic aberration is slightly discernible at the wide end on Panasonic cameras.

It cost much more than those kit lens. Is it worth it? It depends on what you value. I really like the 24mm and macro mode. Weather-sealed is not a criteria I look at when buying this since I don't shoot in conditions that require that. If you look at the price difference for 3 features you don't find on the standard kit lens, it's not too bad actually. It's definitely a lens worth considering if you're choosing a kit lens. More so if you don't like changing lens.

I see this lens primarily as an outdoor lens. Great for walkabouts, casual shots.

I'll rate it probably 4-4.5 stars out of 5.

At a glance
+ Well build weather-sealed body
+ Not too big
+ Light
+ Fast and silent focus
+ Wide angle at 24mm
+ Useful and convenient macro mode
+ Electronic zoom useful for video
+ Reasonably good image quality
+ Worldwide warranty
- Slow f/6.3 at tele end
- No lens hood provided
- No lens pouch provided

--- Compared to Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f/2.0 Lens ---

By the way, I've the 12mm f/2 lens as well. I might be suffering from Gear Acquisition Syndrome. The 12mm f/2 prime has become the lens I use most frequently, to my surprise really. I was just using it recently at a night BBQ party, shooting at mostly f/2 1/30s at ISO 1600. You won't be able to do that with the 12-50mm lens without going to ISO 6400.

If you want to shoot wide at low light, there's not much option to choose from. And because of that, I might actually end up having two 12mm lens. Gasp! I can't believe I just wrote that.

--- Compared to Panasonic 45mm f/2.8 Lens ---

It doesn't feel right to compare these two lens. The Panasonic one is a macro lens and yes, some use it for portraits also. The Olympus is a lens with macro as a feature. The Panasonic wins in terms of image quality of course, but at the price it's selling at, it should.

Once again, I must add that it's incredibly convenient to have a macro feature without having the whole lens being dedicated for that purpose. The respectable macro quality on the 12-50mm lens is a big plus.

This is probably the best quality kit lens I have had with any digital camera. The range of functions this lens has is fantastic. The power zoom function is a great addition for video work. The wide 12mm(24mm in 35mm format)is great for indoors shots and landscapes. This all topped off by the macro function. I would dearly love to keep this lens but I have been using micro 4/3 cameras for a couple of years and have other lenses which cover my use perfectly so I may have to sell it, if I do I will be sad to see it go.

Treated myself to this as I was going on a travelling holiday in Germany and was prevented by baggage allowances from taking all my photographic kit. This certainly did the job; the zoom helped frame landscape shots, it handled low light interior shots in Churches and Castles well and the video footage was a vast improvement on that taken with the standard lense supplied with my EPL1 (mainly due to the super fast and near silent focusing and e-zoom). I also found the macro setting easy to use and, when combined with the macro setting on camera too, these images were excellent.

Just a couple of nagatives. The physical length of the lense rendered the built in flash unusable so the auto settings defaulted to high ISO's 800-1600 when shooting in doors. This actually forced me to experiment with more of the manual setting than I had used before so may turn out to be a good thing. I also found manual zooming was a bit strange, almost as if something was grinding, so I dont use it. The e-zoom is so responsive it's no loss.

I just have to start saving to buy a newer Oly body to really get the best from this lense!