Zuiko Your Way -Old Lenses On New Bodies.

The time has come, the walrus said,

to speak of many things,

of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,

of OM adaper rings.

Couldn't resist the rhyme, so now I'll have to write a post about it. One of the isuues with switching camera makers is that you are left with all the old kit. One thing to do with all the old glass is to reuse it, and Olympus OM fit Zuiko lenses are supposed to be good for this, and especially so for the micro 4/3 format of the Panasonic G3 . There are two reasons for this, firstly the lenses are quick, due to the width of the OM fitting, and secondly they are light -it was part of the OM way- and so should put less strain on the mounting ring of the G3.

One thing to consider though, is that the focal length of the lens will double when used with the 4/3 system, so the 50mm standard lens becomes a 100mm portrait lens. The 500mm mirror lens is now a 1000mm bird spotters delight (maybe).

Another thing to note is that you can pay more or less what you want for the adapter, this one was fourteen quid from eBay, best price on Amazon seemed to be double this, the official Olympus MF-2 is £130! So far this one seems to be well manufactured and it came from a UK supplier (all the Hong Kong wanted more).

Finally, these lenses won't integrate the camera's electronics, unsurprisingly as the OM lenses don't have any. This means that there is no auto-focus and you have to put the G3 into 'shoot without lens' mode and use Aperture priority (A) on the top dial to shoot. When you do that the camera seems to work pretty well, although at high focal lengths it seems to over-expose, but maybe I need to read the manual.

I'll perhaps talk about the individual lenses later -but for now here'a a shot from the Sirius mirror lens.

Birdie -watch me!