Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

I love the exaggerated distortion this lens provides when doing close up shots. The 2x tele-extender works with the lens to provide you with even more separation of the back ground from the subject. Purple fringing is very negligible.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Used as a landscape lens with Fisheye Hemi when I want to lessen the fisheye effect. An excellent Olympus lens on my E-1.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Just bought that lens a couple weeks ago,
It was a great gift that I've done to myself (and my camera!)
There is a real 180 degrees field of view (beware where you put your fingers on the lens if you don't want to see them on the pictures...)
It gives amazing shot for very close pictures and for longer views as well. Deformation effect is pretty cool and gives funny views from elevated places.
A good choice

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Bought this to do landscape and mountain shots. Just got back from a trip to the Smokie Mountains and what a lens. We got some beautiful shots of a lightning storm over the mountains.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

After playing with the 8mm found it to be a great lens,lets you get so close and nice lamdscape shots

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Opens a new outlook, has taken me a few days to get in tune with it, have to keep a eye on the meetering or can overexpose the shot, never been so close to the item I am shooting.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Bought this for landscape photography. Easy to use, love the results. Someone gave a warning to watch your hands on the lens, great advise. ABSOLUTELY LOVE THE RESULTS!

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

This is a great lens - built well and amazingly sharp.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

I use my olympus e 620 excluxively for underwater photography and this lens is perfect for what I do! It's great for large animal shots! If you like macr though this lens is not for you. Olympus makes the best underwater equipment bt far! [...]

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Build and optical quality of professional level. Weather sealing is among the best in the industry, if not THE best. I have used it in rain and snow and works perfectly matted with the new E-5. A great combo for creating very creative pictures in any conditions. Great for street shooting in rain and high wind, creates stunning shots.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

I bought this lens mainly for photo contest. Excellent quality with no regret.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

For many years, I'd come upon a scene while out doing photography, and I'd say to myself: "This would be a great subject for a fisheye lens!" But I never had a fisheye lens to take advantage of those moments, so I had to be content living with the imagined photo in my mind.

Well, this year I finally decided to get a fisheye, and being a very satisfied owner of three Olympus DSLR's, I decided to get the Olympus 8mm fisheye. I've been having a lot of fun with it ever since.

Let's be perfectly honest, the asking price is a lot for a lens that will be spending, at most, 5% of the time on your camera. Hence, it's the kind of lens you get after you have all your other bases covered. But once you have your wide-angle, normal, and telephotos zooms, this little guy can be quite a treat.

The first thing one notices about this lens is that it's built like a tank. It's all metal and glass, which is, sadly, rare to find with today's plastic lenses. The build quality is the best I've ever seen in my many decades of photography. Even if you never took a picture with it, it would still be a work of art.

But the fun begins once you place it on your Olympus (or Panasonic) camera. This lens gives you the kind of perspective that no zoom can provide. For closed-in spaces, like very small rooms, closets, cubicals, it can make them seem huge. My favorite photo with this lens was taken inside of a compartment of an old Pullman sleeper car, where I was able to capture an entire birth in one frame! Try doing that with your 70-300mm zoom.

Image quality is typical of Olympus' high grade lenses: exceptional. Great color, and incredible shaprness. But one thing I learned, is that with large apertures in the f.3.5 to f.5.6 range, you do get some softness in the edges of the frame, which is very typical of this sort of lens. But stop it down to f.8 or so, and it really shows it's stuff. Images are a sharp and clear as you could want, right to the edge of the frame, almost too much so.

As for chromatic aberations, I've never experienced any. I'm sure there might be some if I viewed the images at 500% magnification or so, but even when I view the images so they fill up my color monitor, I don't see anything that would take away from the overall image quality.

Another thing you learn quickly with this lens, is that when used outdoors, and there is any amount of sky in the frame, the camera will, in matrix metering mode, compensate for that beatiful sky, leaving foreground elements looking very dark and under-exposed. The best way to avoid that is to either switch to spot metering, or set the EV to +1 or so, depending on how much sky is in the frame. Bracketing your exposues is not a bad idea. With indoor shots, the matrix metering mode seems to be work the best, as long as you can avoide any bright sources of light in your composition.

A wonderful little advantage of this lens is that when used with an imaged stabilized camera body, like an Olympus E-620, you can get ridicously long hand-held exposures that will amaze you--I'm talking two or three seconds long! No, the photos won't be razor sharp, but they will be far more acceptable than you might imagine.

Since this is a fisheye lens, you can forget about using filters with it, which also means that you will not be able to protect the front element with a UV filter. Since the front element actually protrudes from the barrel, it is best to ALWAYS keep the lens cap on between shots. You also want to keep your fingers as far away from the front of the lens as possible, as it's very easy to get a finger print or two on the lens. It's also surprisingly easy to get your finger in your shot, just by holding the lens to close to the front element! So be very, very careful when using and shooting with the fisheye.

For those of you who love wide-angles and what they can do, this lens is a must have item. I have no doubt it will last you a lifetime, so even though the asking price seems steep, it will be with you for as long as you want to keep it.

I carry mine with me whenever I go out shooting, even if I have no plans to use it, because you just never know when that perfect opportunity for a fisheye lens will come-up, and when it does, I want to make sure I can capture it. I've never had more fun with any other lens I've owned. It will open up a whole new world for any photographer who is brave enough to try one.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Great pics. I have always been a fan of pics taken with this type of lens. The quality is great! Can't wait to play around with it some more.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

I use it for architecture shots ... scenic shots -- it does great.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Great lens for the price. Good for special effects and the quality is superb.

Recommend this lens and the 7-14mm which is even better.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Bought this as a special effect lens and expect to only use it occasionally. Very high quality like the other Olympus lenses. The 7-14 zoom is probably more practical for an ultra wide angle but considerably more cost.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

Well build, sturdy and very sharp lens, actually quite beautiful design.
Great for fun pictures, tall buildings,night skies, and anything else you can think off with such a lens.
A bit too heavy for my E-420

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

this lense as a prime is excellent in terms of color and sharpness. I am very happy as it compliements my kit to push creativity. The quality of the lense construction is great, very sturdy and the lense cap is made out of metal, giving me a lot of confidence to take out on the field. I[...]

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

It's really good for taking pictures of wide landscapes and, of course, funny pictures.

Comments about Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye ED Zuiko Digital Lens:

This lens is extremely sharp and opens a whole new world of creative use. It's a lot of fun to play around with.

There is some minimal CA under extreme contrast, but it can be minimized in PS.