The biggest problem of the ZD 3.5/35 model, tested previously, was its autofocus. Do we get a better performance in this category, paying over two times more? Unfortunately no – the overall score of the focusing mechanism in the case of the ZD 2.0/50 ED is not better than in the case of its shorter and cheaper brother. Above all, the autofocus is louder and slower. The mechanism buzzes noisily and setting the sharpness from infinity to macro takes about 2.5 seconds or even 4 seconds when doing so in the opposite direction. It often happens that it misses the right position at first and then corrects it so we lose even more precious time. It would be really good if Olympus hit on an idea to use a FULL/LIMIT switch, setting the range in such a way that in the LIMIT mode you could be able to sharpen from, say, 0.4 m to infinity. It would improve the speed of the autofocus for sure.
Fortunately the ZD’s 2.0/50 ED autofocus, although slow, is accurate. The number of misses during our studio tests reached only 6%. We also didn’t notice any front or back focus tendencies.
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