Review by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2014

Introduction

That being said - please don't expect too much here. The price point is already an indicator here and Olympus calls it a Lens Cap for reasons. A better name may be 'toy lens' (similar to some Pentax Q lenses). It order to distinguish the Lens Cap from the conventional lineup, Olympus also omitted the usual "M.Zuiko" from the name. While it is manufactured by Olympus and obviously mountable to micro-four-thirds cameras, it has neither any electronics - thus it doesn't produce EXIF data - nor an aperture mechanism in the conventional sense - it has a fixed aperture of f/8. The Lens Cap does not feature an AF motor either. However, it is possible to focus manually via a tiny lever.

The 9mm f/8 Fisheye Lens Cap is a dwarfish being and weighs next to nothing really (30g) ... this is, however, a magnitude more than for the 15mm f/8 which reaches just 22g. ;-) The build quality is Okay - there is nothing wrong with the all-plastic body but the focus lever feels somewhat fragile. In 'transport mode' the lens cap has a ... well ... lens cap/cover similar to ones found in digicams. The 'built-in' lens gets exposed by turning the focus lever into working mode. The first 'click' is the infinity setting. From here on you can focus down to 0.20m. There's also a distinctive 'click' in the middle range which can be used as a one-size-fits-all setting (hyperfocal distance) for conventional scenes. The lens has a focus extension system so it moves a tiny bit when turning the lever. Unsurprisingly you cannot mount a filter but this is true for all fisheye lenses anyway.

It is quite interesting to note that Olympus has put some considerable efforts into the "lens" design this time. Now again, we aren't talking about a conventional lens here but Olympus has incorporated 2 aspherical elements which shows that they spend some thoughts about the optical quality.