PANASONIC LUMIX G II Lens, 20MM, F1.7 ASPH., MIRRORLESS Micro Four Thirds, H-H020AK (USA Black)

Product Information

You need to calibrate your Nikon 50mm lens with the D3S. it was out of focus. Your comparison is misleading… The overall image quality from the 20mm f1.7 II lens from Panasonic is truthfully pretty damned good. There is a healthy amount of sharpness, contrast, and overall solid color rendition built into this lens. When you couple this with its great build quality and focusing abilities you’ve got yourself quite the winner. Another difference is the weight of the new lens vs the original, with the new lens weighing 100g compared to 87g for the original, with both being very lightweight lenses. The 'cats-eye' bokeh is mostly gone by F4. However, bokeh discs becomes less rounded. Specifically, the polygonal shape of the lens's 7-blade aperture becomes more pronounced in the out-of-focus highlights, when you stop down past F2.8, and this can have a slightly negative impact on bokeh in general.

The improved build quality should make the lens last longer, although unfortunately there has not been an improvement in focus speeds with both the old and new lens giving the same focus speeds in our testing. With the same excellent image quality, reasonable value for money, and compact size, this new model should be just as popular as the original and is an excellent choice for Micro Four Thirds users. The new colour options also better match the new cameras from Panasonic and Olympus. i love the 25 1.4 the first prime i bought for m43 which ive been using the last few days on my pen f .. been my take out camera for a few days .. ive also bee n sing the 80mm contax g 2.8 with customized by focal l stabilization of amazing ability Panasonic GX7– The GX7 is a camera that may go best with the lens due to its smaller size–which works best with the lens’s small size. As one should expect at the price point, this 25mm offers a bare-bones feature-set. There's no optical stabilization, though this shouldn't matter for the vast majority of shooters, as almost all modern Micro Four Thirds bodies have internal IS. Nor is there an aperture ring or custom buttons. What the lens does offer is a sizable focus ring. The out-of-focus regions in this F1.7 shot show some purple fringing in front of the subject, aka longitudinal CA (LoCA)

Optically, this lens is like Mary Poppins: Practically perfect in every way. It's razor-sharp wide open (sharpenss is almost always limited by focus accuracy and camera handling) and has nice, smooth bokeh. The 40 mm focal length is just about perfect for a day-to-day lens, especially indoors. It shows little to no signs of flare or glare (with an aftermarket hood). I've shot straight into lights 5+ stops past being blown out, and never observed a flare. Fundamentally, I love the lens because I never need to worry that the lens will let me down optically. I’m absolutely convinced of the quality of this lens. But… what about the focal length? 35 mm is my favorite focal length landscape/context shooting. And I prefer to jump to 70-85 mm for portraits/details. The 40 mm Pana is, as you say, “in between the two great classic focal lengths, the 35 and 50.” But isn’t that a bit problematic? It is neither fish nor flesh. Neither a landscape lens nor a portrait lens. It falls in a “no man’s land” where some photographers may find difficult to work. Macro performance is nothing to write home about here: just 0.13x magnification, with a minimum close-focusing distance of 20cm (about 8 inches). Considering that this was a cosmetic redesign of existing optics, it begs the question "was this an epic screw-up, or is this a cynical ploy to design some cosmetic depreciation into their products to decrease resale values and increase the replacement rate?" Yes, the days of everyone and their neighbor owning a big DSLR may soon be over. We are finally getting smaller cameras with the quality of the big guys. All we need is some minor improvements and some better glass (for m4/3). Today we have the m4/3 cameras, the fabulous Leica X1 and M9 and even the new Samsung NX10 that is about to hit the streets. It’s awesome to have these choices, and for those who are like me and tired of lugging around 20 lbs of gear, well you now have quality choices!

When compared with against rivals with similar focal lengths, the new lens ranks third, surprisingly, behind the original model and the Olympus M. Zuiko 17mm f1.8 although it outperforms the latter lens in overall image sharpness. It is quite slow to focus by modern standards, but is still my favorite carry-everywhere companion. The Panasonic Lumix G 20mm f/1.7 II with a redesigned styling and metal parts, and this gives a very slight improvement in resistance to flare, as well as a slight improvement in contrast. The redesign has very slightly improved the position of the surrounding plastic closest to the lens, which results in a very slight improvement in shielding light from hitting the lens at oblique angles.For this discussion, at this time, we are talking about how good a lens is for the general photographer, not for just a super talented photographer. Realise that we now have much better choices in fast, cheap and good quality lenses in other FLs.