Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 14-42 mm f/3.5-5.6 ED
6. Distortion
Please Support UsIf you enjoy our reviews and articles, and you want us to continue our work please, support our website by donating through PayPal. The funds are going to be used for paying our editorial team, renting servers, and equipping our testing studio; only that way we will be able to continue providing you interesting content for free. |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
One glance at the photos below is enough to find out that the situation is not good in this category. At the shortest focal length we note a very high barrel distortion reaching as much as −5.48%. With the increasing of the focal length this aberration changes sign quickly and at 28 mm it becomes a quite pronounced “pincushion” with the value of 1.29%. As if it wasn’t enough in the rest of the focal length range it increases all the time and at 42 mm it reaches as much as 2.86%.
Well…apparently Olympus assumed that they don’t have to design optical devices distortion-free because E-P1 and E-P2 feature a distortion correction system anyway. In our opinion such a policy is not good – if we want to get a “normal” image the correction of significant barrel distortion must be connected with limiting the lens’s field of view. After all a distortion correction program can’t “conjure up” information about the parts of image which were “pushed” outside the frame by distortion.
 |
 |
 |
