Review: Panasonic 45-200mm f/4.0 – 5.6 Lumix G Vario MEGA OIS Zoom Micro Four Thirds…

Review: Pana­sonic 45-200mm f/4.0 – 5.6 Lumix G Vario MEGA OIS Zoom Micro Four Thirds Lens

Pana­sonic appar­ently do not believe in catchy names for their lenses. But it does at least tell you exactly what you’re getting.

Since this is a micro four thirds lens you’re look­ing at a zoom of 90mm to 400mm on the stan­dard 35mm scale. That’s a pretty good range and cer­tainly brings things much closer to you.

I got the chance to really put this lens through its paces dur­ing my Dis­ney World trip. I was reg­u­larly switch­ing between this and my stan­dard 14 – 45 kit lens.

Obvi­ously it was great in the ani­mal king­dom for get­ting really close to ani­mals, but it also works rather well for parades when your view angles are some­what lim­ited due to the crowds. You can also take unposed shots with­out shov­ing your cam­era in people’s faces. I got pretty good at doing on the fly swap­ping of the two lenses and it’s cer­tainly very prac­ti­cal to have them both handy even on long out­ings like that.

Of course like any zoom lens it does weigh quite a bit more than the smaller lenses and inevitably it makes the cam­era front heavy. Since it’s a micro 4/3rds it’s not really that heavy in com­par­i­son to mir­ror lenses, but this lens eas­ily weighs more than the cam­era it’s attached to.

That said, it’s light enough that you absolutely can hand­hold and shoot even at rel­a­tively slow shut­ter speeds. I don’t know if I would go much below 1/50^th at full zoom if I wanted to be sure of get­ting a shot though.

As far as shot qual­ity is con­cerned there’s noth­ing but good things to say. Images come out sharp  and I haven’t noticed any dis­tor­tions or fring­ing. It may be a bud­get price, but it’s a qual­ity lens.

If you’re look­ing for a zoom lens for your micro four thirds cam­era this is the one you want.

Ama​zon​.com: http://​amzn​.to/​Q​b​t​c1H

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