Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM Lens Review

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Guido — No Comments ↓

There are already some reviews about this lens out there and it was released a couple of years ago in August 2006. Still I think it is worthwhile to share my experiences with this standard 50mm prime lens. This review is again like all my reviews based on my practical experience in the field. I didn’t perform any laboratory tests so please see this article as a user experience report that I want to share with you guys.

In this review I want to cover the main optical aspects of this lens like sharpness, flare, distortion etc. Also I want to present some overall performance impressions and how it compares to the other 50mm lenses in the Canon line-up. My review is based on the use with a Canon 5D Mark II Full Frame camera body. However, this lens also works fine on every other Canon EOS camera with APSC sensor size but the field of view will be more narrow on those ones.

Full Frame versus Micro Four Thirds Format – Some Thoughts

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Guido — 6 Comments ↓

In this article I want to talk about the controversial debate about Full Frame versus Micro Four Thirds format. You can read a lot about this across the Internet. The relatively small Four Thirds sensor format experienced a big hype not only since Olympus published its best seller OM-D E-M5 in early 2012. More and more people seem to swap from their big and chunky DSLR gear towards the much more compact Micro Four Thirds system dominated by Olympus and Panasonic.

I want to discuss the current digital camera market situation and how it has changed over the past 12 months. Furthermore, I want to summarise the major differences of the two formats and why we may want both of them.

Please note that this article is based solely on my personal experience and opinion. There is a lot more to say about this topic and I am not an expert in this field. I just want to share some thoughts about my recent observations in the digital camera space.

Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8 Lens Review

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Guido — 10 Comments ↓

This is going to be my very first lens review about the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8 lens to kick off this blog. I want to emphasize that this and any following reviews are non-scientific and purely based on my personal experience. I am not going to present any test charts or counting pixels. There are better websites out there that do a great job on reviewing technical aspects of photographic gear. I want to focus more on practical applications in the field and share my experience with you guys.

For this review I used as a test platform my Olympus E-PL5 camera body in RAW mode. All presented images are processed in Olympus Viewer 2 software and then finished in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Black and white conversions are done in Nik’s Sliver Efex Pro 2. No additional sharpening was applied.