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Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm 1:1.8 MSC
A relatively fast prime for mFT, with a field of view like a 90mm - lens on "fullframe" a typical portrait-lens, very well made with fast and silent AF and with very good optics.
This lens is, what the 50/1.8 is for Canon APS-C or the 85/1.8 is for Canon "fullframe": A short portrait - tele. These primes are very popular and often the first non-zoom-lenses people buy in their lifes - and often the only one. And indeed it is a very versatile focal length: You can use it to shoot head-and-shoulder-portraits indoors, is fast enough to shoot indoors under artificial light with moderate ISOs, is fast and long enough to blurr the background nicely, but slow enough to not make it overly big and heavy or expensive.
This is also true for this Olympus: It's not as cheap as the Canon 50/1.8, which is Canons cheapest lens of all, but a lot better made, too. It's a bit cheaper than the 85/1.8 new and offers very good mechanical and optical quality and a near silent MSC-drive. It's a bit worse in the corners, but otherwise very comparable to the Canon 85/1.8, but half the size, of course...
This is a very desirable lens.
COMPATIBILITY
As a classic, genuine M.Zuiko, it works perfectly with every mFT camera, Panasonic or Olympus. There are no known issues in any combination, but remember, that, other than Olympus, most Panasonic-bodies don't have stabilization built in, so you don't have any with this lens, but you won't need it anyway, it's fast enough.
PRICE
Around € 300,- new and around € 220,- used. I got mine as "buy-it-now" for € 170,- with an obviously scratched and worn body but perfect optics and funstion. The black one is more expensive, used and new, which is quite off.
ACCESSORIES
As usual, this original M.Zuiko is shipped without the shade, I wouldn't use anyway. They charge obscene prices for this cheap plastic-barrel, so I'd always buy third-party if you insist in having a fixed shade, or use my favourite, a collapsible rubber hood instead. But honestly: Do you really buy such a tiny lens to destroy it's size with a shade?
It uses 37mm filters, which seems to evolve as a smaller standard for mFT-lenses: The older 14-42mm R MSC, the newer 14-42mm EZ and the Pana 14-42mm PZ use it, too. My other two "standard"-lens-selections are the 9-18mm and the Panasonic 45-150mm, which both use 52mm-filters, so I just have to carry two small (cheap) sizes. Of course it'd be better to just have one size of filters, but that's the price you have to pay for the size-advantage: You can't built a 90-300 equivalent lens or an ultrawide with 37mm filters and bigger filters would destroy the size-advantage of the 45mm or the 14-42.
It's worth mentioning, that even one normal filter is so thick in comparison to this lens, that it looks a bit strange, but it's still OK.
Like on all mFT-lenses I know of, the focus-ring doesn't really move an optical element, but actuates the AF-motor, which, other than I expected at first, actually works fine and even has the advantage, that it can be progressive: The faster you turn the ring, the bigger it's steps are.
The filter - thread doesn't rotate, making the use of grads and polarizers uncomfortable.
MECHANICS
Made in China.
Metal lens mount.
The build-quality is great. It is a completely different world than e.g. the Canon-KIT-lenses or the 50/1.8. While being built of plastics, is has no apparent tolerances, nothing has play or wobbles, nothing makes noises and the plastics feel high-quality and sturdy. And that's even on my worn sample.
The focus-ring feels exceptionally smooth.
Not Canon-L-standard, but great.
Plastic filter thread.
"MSC" is Olympus' version of an Ultrasonic-AF-motor, extremely fast and nearly completely silent. Fulltime manual override is possible. It doesn't "feel" as fast as on Canon DSLRs, but this is due to the system itself and not a fault of the motor: Contrast-AF (used in all cameras that focus relying on the sensor-image), while being absolutely precise, in comparison to phase-detection-AF used in most DSLRs, does not "know" in which direction to focus, so it always moves in both directions (near and far) before it locks, while in most situations, when focus isn't completely off, DSLRs at once turn in the right direction, but don't have such a high precision. AF-fine-tuning (or Micro-Focus-Adjustment, MFA, as Canon calls it) simply isn't necessary on mFT.
This lens is perfect for me: If I had the chance to decide, I would have built this lens of plastics, too, to safe weight, and it still is built very well.
GREAT!
ERGONOMICS
It feels and handles great.
This is an extremely small lens and weighs next to nothing, but still has a broad focus-ring and balances nicely. Size DOES matter, also see Lenses: What's important?.
Fulltime manual focus override is possible, as it always is on mFT, and you can turn the zoom-ring with one finger.
A problem with the longer teles like the 40-150 or the 45-150 and their size and weight is, that I find it very hard to hold these light lenses steady enough to not blurr the pictures. This seems to be a lot easier with this one. I have never had any problems with the 1/focal-length-rule, which is ideal for this focal length in general, because you'll mainly shoot people with it and 1/100 is a shutter speed, that stops people's action, too, as well as camera shake @ 90mm equivalent.
The used materials, a combination of metal and high quality plastics, are great for me, combining the weight- and stability advantages of both.
There is no focus-scale, infrared-focus-indices or depth-of-field-scale.
The filter-ring doesn't move.
Overall: GREAT!
OPTICS
Optics are very good, but not exactly as good as comparable lenses for real DSLRs.
The most important thing is, that it's perfectly usable at every setting, even @ f/1.8. Basically, this is all you need to know and you can stop reading here.
The minimum focus distance is 0.5m, so the maximum magnification is aprox. 1:5, which looks like 1:2.5 on fullframe and as such isn't as good as the very best technically, but in it's appearance makes a seperate macro-lens obsolete, apart from the need for working-distance.
Distortion is automatically corrected by mFT-cameras and therefore on a completely irrelevant level. I don't really care for the uncorrected values, because for me, the results is what counts, but if you insist, it's only slightly worse.
Vignetting is hardly visible @ f/1.8 and even diminishes when zoomed in or stopped down.
The aperture is made of 7 rounded blades, giving you very smooth out-of-focus highlights with hardly any 14-ray-light-stars. As blurring backgrounds will surely be one of the major aspects for this lens, it's worth to say, that the bokeh is very good indeed.
I don't have any information about this lens' usability for infrared-photography, sorry.
Flare is nothing to worry about, like with most mFT-lenses: Maybe it's because of the all-so-tiny elements, but it's hard to produce any flare with the light outside of the frame. While I think, that a lens less prone to flare and especially ghosting is not always better, as at least ghosts can be a very nice tool to show the lighting conditions in your pictures, this lens only flares and produces ghosts, when the light-source is in the frame. But you can shoot directly into the sun and if you don't burn your sensor doing so, the pictures look great all the time, with just some ghosts in the opposite corner of the photo. If you really manage to "glow-out" your picture due to flare, it is easily shielded by one hand or avoided by changing the angle a bit, because it is so light and small.
Lateral CAs (purple/green fringes along high-contrast edges), are hardly visible, maybe around 0.5 pixels wide at max. This is worst wide open, which seems a bit unusual. You don't even have to correct this in my opinion.
Sharpness is one of the most overrated qualities of lenses. That being said, this lens is great, already sharp wide open, getting a bit better when stopped down. Nonetheless, it's a bit worse than the similar Canon - offerings, especially in the corners.But that's never to a degree that could be really disturbing.
Here are some samples for CA and sharpness:
100% Crop from 16MP JPG (E-PM2), roughly the center, f/1.8 (wide-open).
100% Crop from 16MP JPG (E-PM2), top-left corner, f/1.8 (wide-open), mainly fine-detail contrast is lost.
As mentioned above, there's absolutely nothing to ever think about.
On mFt, stopping down doesn't really help sharpness to the same degree as on "fullframe", because due to the smaller sensor, diffraction, meaning the purely physical effect of softening when closing the aperture, that has nothing to do with the lens' quality, already starts to become visible from around f/5.6 on, while it is f/8 or f/11 on APS-C and "fullframe". These lenses are still perfectly usable at f/11, of course, but already getting weaker.
But if a lens is this sharp wide open, it's not necessary to worry about stopping down.
Alternatives
Not really any.
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