The 16mm is pretty resistant to flare, even when given significant provocation, with good levels of contrast maintained even in contre jour images with veiling flare.Īutofocus was snappy to the degree that I didn't ever really have to think about it. As you'd expect, the performance gets better if you stop down a couple of notches. Sharpness seems good if not necessarily stellar and with what appears to be pretty good cross-frame consistency, until you reach the extreme corners. Optically, I was pretty impressed with the lens, the F1.4 (F2.8 35mm-equivalent) aperture gave me plenty of control over depth-of-field and sufficient light for low-light work. It's a little under-damped for my tastes, rotating fairly freely but it was effective on the few occasions I ended up having to manual focus (turns out LED Christmas lights and autofocus do not always play nicely with one-another). The lens's only control point is a large by-wire focusing ring. In terms of handling, I felt the 16mm worked best when mounted on the larger Micro Four Thirds camera that feature prominent hand grips: its comparatively long length feeling a little unbalanced on the smaller, rangefinder-style boxes, though it's light enough that it doesn't end up feeling too front-heavy. I didn't expect it to make any difference but found myself constantly fighting against too much stuff creeping into the edges of the frame in a way that I don't with a 35mm. It's an interesting focal length to end up with: not quite 28mm equiv., which many people would consider the gateway to wide-angle, but also noticeably wider than the near-normal of 35mm equiv. The 16mm F1.4 acts as a 32mm equivalent lens on the Micro Four Thirds platform.
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