The Olympus 14-150mm f4-5.6 II lens is a really good option for most photographers. It isn’t going to give you the absolute best images, but the images that it delivers are still quite good. If you need a superzoom with weather sealing and a pretty good zoom range, you can’t beat this one. Slap it into your camera and go shooting. You won’t be disappointed; and if you are, you can just fix it in post. Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc. In the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm f/4-5.6 II, Olympus employed an iris diaphragm with 7 rounded blades, which has resulted in a pretty decent, albeit not outstanding, bokeh for a zoom lens – at least in our opinion. However, recognising that bokeh evaluation is subjective, we have provided a few examples for your perusal. Some of you might be wondering whether it would make more sense to choose the Mark II or go with the original version of the 14-150mm. The truth is that the two lenses are very similar. The Mark II has weather sealing, a sturdier body and less flare but the optics and zoom range are exactly the same. Keep in mind that the first version will indubitably be cheaper. With the zoom set to 45mm, sharpness levels are still outstanding in the centre of the frame at maximum aperture and the lens performs excellently towards the edges of the frame. Peak sharpness across the frame is achieved at f/8 for this focal length and sharpness is outstanding from edge to edge.

Indeed, the lens continued to work with no issues. We left it to air dry in the warmth of my apartment after the shoot and it only needed a bit of a wipedown afterward. So while the New York City subway system may fail you, the Olympus M.Zuiko ED 14-150mm f/4-5.6 II Lens surely won’t. AutofocusConventional wisdom tends to state that superzoom lenses of this type are all about convenience and give inferior results to pairing standard and telephoto zooms. But the reality is a bit more complicated than that. In fact, the 14-150mm is pretty sharp towards the wide end of its range (although it’s noticeably soft in the corners at 14mm), giving comparable or better results compared with the 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 kit zooms supplied with many Micro Four Thirds cameras. However, as you zoom beyond 50mm it gets progressively weaker, and at the long end it’s noticeably soft, rendering little in the way of really fine detail. But with careful shooting and processing it’s still good enough for a nice 12x8in print. It’s fair to say this lens is much better suited to some Micro Four Thirds cameras than others. Long lenses such as this tend to work better on cameras that have eye-level viewfinders, as this enables a more stable shooting stance. Its maximum aperture in the telephoto range is also decidedly slow (ranging from f/5.2 at 50mm to f/5.8 at 150mm), and this means that if you use it on a Panasonic body without in body image stabilisation (IBIS), you’ll need either lots of light or high ISO settings to achieve the high shutter speeds needed to avoid blur from handshake.

Despite all this glass, the 14-150mm is surprisingly compact, with a barrel diameter of 63.5mm and a length of 80.4mm from the mount to the front of the non-rotating 52mm filter thread. In context, it’s smaller than Olympus’s budget M.Zuiko Digital 40-150mm f/4-5.6 telezoom and barely larger than 18-55mm kit zooms for APS-C DSLRs. At 285g it’s not especially heavy, either. small and handy but I am not used to the extreme cheap-construction Level without lens hood and every few month I got dust between the lenses

Compared to Micro Four Thirds kit zooms

I did not observe any chromatic aberration with this lens, even in shots featuring tree branches taken straight into the sun. Example of a photo taken into the sun – E-M1, 1/500, f/ 8, ISO 200 Well guess what, it took the abuse with no problems. Many lenses out there wouldn’t be able to do this but this lens surely had no issue with the cold–unfortunately we can’t say the same for most New Yorkers.