Review by Sebastian Milczanowski, published July 2011

Introduction

Many people have the desire of minimizing the amount of carried photography gear without loosing too much flexibility. There's, of course, no perfect solution here but the Micro Four-Thirds system offers two interesting extreme zoom lens options. In the scope of this review we'll have a look at the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm f/4-5.6. You should be able to find one for around 500EUR/600US$ which is not cheap in absolute terms but this is roughly in line with comparable offerings from other original manufacturers.

The build quality of the lens is very good. The lens body is made of plastic parts based on a metal mount and it is assembled with very tight tolerances. The focus and zoom control rings operate pretty smooth. Typical for all lenses in this class it extends when zooming towards the long end of the range. Furthermore, the internal focusing system moves just two lens units for focusing which results in a comparatively fast contrast AF. The virtually silent lens drive is well suited for movie shooting without annoying focusing noise.

The following image shows a comparison between the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150mm f/4-5.6 and the Panasonic Lumix G VARIO 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH Mega O.I.S - you may notice that it's not really that much bigger in its retracted state (@ 14mm).