Olympus Zuiko Digital 35 mm f/3.5 Macro review - Autofocus

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Olympus Zuiko Digital 35 mm f/3.5 Macro

28 September 2011

Arkadiusz Olech

10. Autofocus

Here we reach the biggest slip-up of the tested lens. The minimalist design took revenge on the Olympus in this category. Most of macro lenses, produced by other companies, feature a FULL/LIMIT autofocus mode switch. If you set it at LIMIT you narrow the range of autofocus and this way often improve the achievements of the mechanism a lot. Unfortunately Olympus stinted on it. As a result the autofocus works slowly, getting from infinity to macro in about 1-1.5 seconds; going the other way round can take even up to 3 seconds. Additionally the lens buzzes audibly - it is far more pronounced than in the case of the 14-42 mm kit lens, although not as loud as in a much more expensive 50 mm Macro.

The accuracy is even a bigger problem. The number of misses in studio conditions reached as high as 17% which is a weak result. Let’s remind here that our definition describes a miss when a given resolution level is more than 20% lower than the maximum resolution reached at a given aperture.

Fortunately the autofocus doesn’t have any front or back focus tendencies so if it misses, it does it evenly and fairly once before, once after a photographed object.

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