There's been a lot of talk about the different kit lenses from Olympus and Panasonic. In the end I just got tired of it and decided to make a small test of my own to see the difference between the kit lens for the E-M5 and E-M1. Now, these two lenses are so far apart I shouldn'r really be doing this. One is realy expensive and very well built and the other is, well, it's a flimsy kit lens and a slow one at that with f6.3 at the tele end.

If you read around the forums you'll notice some using the 12-50 all the time while others just don't touch it after the first test shots have been made. This tells me there's a lot of variation with the 12-50 and it's like buying a lottery ticket if you get a good one or not. If you look at the image at the top of this post you will see there isn't a lot of difference between these two lenses so it looks like I got a pretty good one. From my other outings with this lens, I can actually confirm that it is a good one and I would not hesitate to go out with this lens mounted. Except that well, f6.3 is f6.3 which is kind of slow so good light is required when shooting with this lens.

Looking at the other kit lens, the 12-40 f2.8 which comes with the new E-M1 you can tell the quality just by looking at it. Very sturdy, excellent build quality and image quality matches that too. Several reviewers have stated that this lens will replace everything they have in primes for this focal length and I can quite agree with that statement. It simply is a very good lens. It is however, rather big and this is where the primes come in. All the Olympus primes are small and light producing excellent image quality. Whether you take one lens with you or 3 small primes is of course a personal thing and I'm not going to start agruing for or against primes and/or zooms.

If you came here looking for images that would sway you one way or the other, I have to disappoint you because personally, I simply couldn't tell the difference without reverting to the exif data.