Olympus 9mm f/8 Fisheye Body Cap Lens Review

Olympus 9mm f/8 Fisheye Body Cap Lens Performance

As far as sharpness is concerned, this lens actually performs pretty well. Clarity in the centre of the frame is very good, with fairly good performance being achieved towards the edges of the frame.

How to read our charts The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column. The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple. For this review, the lens was tested on a Panasonic Lumix G6 using Imatest.

As is typical of fisheye optics, chromatic aberrations can be quite prominent towards the edges fo the frame. Imatest recorded over 3.25 pixel widths of fringing towards the edges of the frame, which will become apparent along high contrast areas of images.

How to read our charts Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Severe chromatic aberration gives a noticeable fringing or a halo effect around sharp edges within the picture. It can be cured in software. Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. For this review, the lens was tested on a Panasonic Lumix G6 using Imatest.

Even with the fixed f/8 aperture, falloff of illumination towards the comers can be seen under certain conditions. Imatest read the corners as 1.64 stops darker than the image centre. As the aperture is not adjustable, there is no way to achieve visually uniform illumination.

Distortion is as you might expect from a fisheye. Using a fisheye lens will always be a creative choice, where the distortion is used to enhance your image.

During testing, this lens was quite resistant to flare and contrast remains good, even when shooting images with a bright light source in the frame.

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