When I was out the other day with my partner shopping in the West End we happened to go in the Halls of Mammon, more commonly known as Selfridges department store. Initially this was to have a coffee break and use their facilities, but ended up in our wandering around for a bit looking at kitchen utensils when we found the photography department.
It impressed us.
Not the prices, as they were for the most part full retail, but because they had a pretty full selection of all the major brands on cameras: Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Sony, Canon, Fuji, Panasonic, Tamron lenses, Manfrotto tripods and Olympus cameras plus other things like accessories.
All in all a one stop shop for the photography enthusiast.
I of course was drawn the the Olympus section while my beloved nosed around the Nikon cameras and lenses. Afterwards we had quite a lengthy discussion on the various lenses we had seen; the Olympus ones in particular we had only seen pictures of on the internet. My question being around wide-angles and whether one should get a prime or a zoom. I quite fancy, as in I'm saving up for, the F2 20mm wide angle but I'm also very tempted by the 7-14mm F2.8 zoom that Olympus offer.
Today's post is a test of the assumptions we discussed on our walk.
Would a picture taken with a wide-angle zoom be of a good enough quality? Now I don't have the 7-14mm but I do have the 14-42mm pancake zoom that Olympus make. It's considered a kit lens: as in an all round cheap zoom, and I haven't seen a thorough review of it done by DXOMark, which is not that unsurprising really as by their standards it is cheap and cheerful.
I'll let you all be the judge but I have to say that I was surprised and impressed by the results.
The colours are slightly different because these were taken under artificial light and I obviously didn't adjust the pictures to match.
You can compare these with the shots I took with my 60mm macro here.
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