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24 May 2011 - A Walk with an Olympus PEN E-PL2 with Nikkor 85F2 manual focus lens
Today I wanted to test manual focusing using my old Nikon lenses on the Olympus PEN E-PL2, one of the new micro four-thirds cameras. It uses a sensor half the dimensions of a full frame camera, much larger than the popular compact cameras like my Canon G-11. This should give me higher resolution photos, but still with a compact camera. The first photo shows the Olympus PEN camera with the optional VF-2 electronic viewfinder, a big improvement over framing using the screen on the back of the camera body, as far as I'm concerned. One of the attractions of the new 4/3rds cameras are their ability to use almost any older manual focus lens (with an appropriate adaptor). Given that I have several high quality Nikon non-zoom lenses I was anxious to try them out. I attached the Nikkor 85F2 AI lens to the camera and headed out for my walk of almost an hour.
There are two important features. The camera allows you to magnify the view 7X or 14X for precise manual focusing. And the camera body has an IS image stabilization function built in. How would they work in the field? Of course, this isn't a fast-action setup since some care must be taken in focusing. Since the camera has a lens factor of 2X the Nikon 85/2 acts like a 170/2 on this camera. My first big discovery was focusing with a 170mm focal length lens with the view magnified by 14 was tricky, since the image danced around with me hand-holding the camera. However, I was generally successful in finding a good focus. I was impressed by the EPL2-s ability to stabilize the image for a nice sharp image. Very nice!
The photos below are images that caught my eye in my stroll around Mason. The telephoto lens compressed the image and the shallow depth of field is evident in some photos. Most were taken at F4 or F5.6 with a few at F2 or F8. After some experience with this setup I started focusing with the lens set at F2 (for maximum brightness and minimum depth of field). After achieving focus I swithed off the magnification factor, set the aperture, reframed the image and snapped the picture. The bottom two rows of photos show a test of the IS system. For each pair of photos I took the first one hand-held, then I found a support to hold the camera against for a second shot. In each case I found little difference between the two shots. Also shown are 100% crops of the pair of photos for critical comparison. Click on the crops to see the full high resolution 3648x2736 pixel photo. There are also a few additional links under some of the photos to download the full high resolution photos.
In the end I was very impressed by the capabilities of this small camera and excited with the possibilities to use older heritage lenses on this modern camera. Comparing the results on tripod of several Nikon lenses, comparing the resulting images with those shot with the 14-42 kit lens that came with the camera, I can see that the Nikkors deliver superior images.
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