If you're prepared to make a few sacrifices though, this is a decent lens if you're looking for a portable lens that'll hit 800mm. The excellent quality of the weather-sealed construction is a credit to OM’s line-up of Premium lenses, and the smart focus distance/magnification indicator is a bonus.

Against a busy background I always have to switch back to SAF because CAF or CAF-TR is not sticky enough. Many of my readers are here because of travel photography, so I decided to start making posts about photo gear. II occasionally gets a bad rap –mainly because lots of people slap it on their camera, slide it out to 300mm, take a couple of snaps from the hip and decide that it's too soft.For example, the first copy of the 75-300 I tried was ridiculously poor and I sent it back immediately. I know the dual-IS function only works for panasonic cameras, but I thought lens stabilization was sometimes preferrable to IBIS, especially for longer focal ranges? but the differences between them are negligible in the center of the frame and become noticeable away from the center, especially at 300mm, with Olympus being ever so slightly sharper in the center in some frames and Panasonic being sharper overall at the edges. The best camera deals, reviews, product advice, and unmissable photography news, direct to your inbox!

My lens is always sharp near the centre but definitely needs to be stopped down to get good edges and corners, particularly at 75 to about 250mm. That said, Panasonic bodies are super fast for focusing on stationary subjects, but it's not best in class for tracking so dont expect super high keeper rate from BIF. And at 300 mm my copy of Olympus is sharper at the top of the frame (but equally blurry at the bottom). It's not perfect of course, with a narrow-ish maximum aperture and a few sharpness issues (all but unavoidable with a lens of this type), but it's a hugely impressive achievement of optical engineering and one that any Micro Four Thirds user will get a great deal of value out of.I did a sort of scientific test (for me anyway) and shot an Old El Paso jar with 3 lenses all at the same camera settings. At a focal length of 300 mm, this lens is – just like the Panasonic 100-300 mm – not yet the tack sharp telephoto lens some micro-43 users are waiting for.

Olympus does not claim any sort of weather resistance for this lens, and indeed you cannot see a rubber seal around the mount (note that no current Micro Four Thirds camera is weather sealed anyway). After looking at various reviews of the lens I knew it was regarded as being soft at 300mm but it looked like a good upgrade to my 40-150mm as it seemed sharper at 150mm. ED, Olympus employed an iris diaphragm with 7 rounded blades, which has resulted in a pretty nice bokeh for a zoom lens, at least in our opinion. I tried several copies of the Olympus lens: there was significant copy variation but not affecting sharpness. The downside is it's not at its sharpest when shooting at its maximum focal length, while you can't expect an f/6.

The Olympus 75-300 mm is only 12 cm long in its shortest configuration, but it nevertheless has a zoom range that corresponds with the viewing angle of a 150-600 mm zoom lens on a camera with a full-frame sensor.

Paired with one of Olympus’s cameras (OMD M5 mark II for instance), you get an inexpensive stabilized 600mm full-frame equivalent. When you enlarge the image up to 100%, a limited amount of chromatic aberration becomesw visible, as you can cee in this crop. The lack of lens stabilization means that you're going to be relying on your camera's in-body stabilization (IBIS), so again the meatier models will offer better compensation as well as balance.

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