Olympus E330 lens test 2

• see also:
  • telephoto reach - super-telephotos on a budget - my tests
  • Olympus E330
  • E330 with OM lenses
  • E330 lenstests 1
  • E330 lens tests 3 - 50mm lens shoot out
  • Olympus E330 macrophotography
  • Olympus E digital
  • Olympus OM
  • lenses and lens testing
  • Popular photography tests of various mirror (catadioptric) lenses
  • Bytesmith's OM telephoto lens tests on 4/3rds

My rough lens testing setup:

• print 2 copies of test target standard resolution charts printed at 300dpi  and pinned to black cardboard sheet
• Olympus E330 on tripod with lens shaded and mirror lockup set to 2secs, manually focussed with 10x live preview on centre target.
• Exposure set to aperture priority, AWB at ISO100. No exposure adjustment.
• image quality set at SHQ jpg.
• no post-processing or resizing but images cropped and converted to jpg with 54% compression.
• camera to target distance adjusted for constant magnification to give this image size:

  "x2" target image (mainly to allow testing of 300mm lenses)

Examples of lens tests using the "x2" target image distance:

NB. surprisingly, most of the lenses had reasonably similar performances being able to resolve down to 5 or 6 of group 1.

Lens
Zuiko OM 50mm f/3.5 macro at f/3.5	nice performance wide open, but then it is a macro f/3.5 lens
Zuiko OM 50mm f/3.5 macro at f/8
Zuiko OM 35-105mm f/3.5 at 105mm and f/8
Tamron SP 300mm f/5.6 tele macro at f/5.6	a bit of lens flare and fringing
Tamron SP 300mm f/5.6 tele macro at f/8	that's better	crop of moon same setup but over-exposed by 3 stops shows purple fringing
Sigma OM 75-300mm Mark II at 300mm and f/5.6 not a bad result for a zoom at effective 600mm f/5.6!	a bit soft wide open	crop of the moon
Sigma OM 75-300mm Mark II at 300mm and f/8
Tamron OM 200mm f/3.5 lens at f/3.5
Tamron OM 200mm f/3.5 lens at f/5.6 much nicer!
Tamron Adaptall 80-210mm f/3.8-4 at 210mm and f/4
Tamron Adaptall 80-210mm f/3.8-4 at 210mm and f/5.6 see actual photos of me playing cricket with this lens here
Hanimex 300mm mirror lens fixed f/5.6 as expected from a cheap lens and one of mirror design with its inherent low contrast, the image quality is a bit soft but it may have some use given its compact size for an equivalent 600mm focal length.
my Maksutov Cassegrain mirror lens 500mm f/5.6 with 2x Teleplus OM teleconverter	resized to show field of view (this combination is equivalent to a 2000mm f/11) ISO 400 and 1/100th sec with mirror lock up ("antishock" = 4 sec)	100% crop - note the blurriness is mainly due to the poor seeing conditions rather than limitations of the lens no sharpening applied. slight amount of green fringing visible
now, the Olympus E510 with its built-in image stabiliser, hand held with the incredible ZD 50-200mm with EC-20 2x teleconverter to give 800mm reach at f/7	100% crop, no PS, no sharpening, hand held, 1/200th sec, f/7, ISO 400 at 800mm eq. telephoto reach