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| Olympus E-5 & 14-150mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 150mm, 1/640th @ f/5.6, ISO200 |
The lens that really fulfills the promise of the Four Thirds format DSLRs is the Panasonic Leica D Vario-Elmar 14-150mm F3.5-5.6 Asph. It's the equivalent, field of view-wise, to the Canon EF 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS on a full-frame camera and, in my opinion, gives up pretty much nothing to the Canon in the quality optics department.
There's some vignetting and barrel distortion at the very widest end, but across the ranges I shoot at it's nearly distortion free and it's plenty sharp all the way out to 150mm...and it's less than half the size and weight of the equivalent full frame Canon.
So while the Olympus pro body is about the same size and weight as a Canon 5D or Nikon D7xx, you can get a high-grade superzoom with a 300mm max focal length on there for a fraction of the mass penalty thanks to the physically smaller sensor.
They're long discontinued, and were uncommon and expensive when they were new, and so they're rare finds on the used market these days and still fetch six bills or so when you find one. Another side effect of them being uncommon is that lens hoods are near impossible to find. I'm still looking.
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