Olympus Pen FT

shadowfox said:
Raid: You? jealous? I still can't forget the picture of your stable of Rollei SL35 and its lenses... oh... the envy... :p
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Will: It's never enough. is it! Actually, I am rarely using the Pen FT these days, but I can envision its usefulness for a trip as a light alternate camera outfit.

With the M42 adapter, my 85mm/1.8 SMC lens is about a 135mm/1.8 or so. I am just guessing here, and someone will correct me how to correctly translate the 85mm from 135 format to the half frame format. The 50/1.4 is a tele with 1.4 max aperture and using the sweet spot of the lens.

I lack a wide angle lens for the Pen.
 
I think wide angle lenses are the weakness of the Pen F system; there's not much selection, and they are slow. But then this is 1960's gear, and I think then we tended to look more favorably on longer-than-normal lenses. Whether the technology wasn't quite there for fast wides, or it was a lack of market, I don't know.

The various full-frame SLR lens adapters for the Pen F don't help much in the wide department either, as the angle of view "multiplier" is about 1.5, similar to your typical Nikon or Pentax dSLR, and so it suffers the same crop situation with wides.

The Zuiko 20mm f3.5 is a brilliant lens, seems to me, so that's all to the good! Sample below... (Kodak Portra 100UC)

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shadowfox said:
I almost forgot that you have one also, Roland :)
Would love to see a wide-open picture from the 1.2
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Frank and Will: I searched a bit and don't have any !
I have shot quite a bit with the 42/1.2 but never wide open.
Back when I had Pen F gas all I was interested in was a bright viewfinder ...
Come Leicas, come bokeh .... I'll try on one of the next week-ends.

The 100mm in the pic above is one of the best lenses for the money:

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(the guy was sprayed with water to cool down :) )

Cheers,

Roland.
 
Raid, I have the exact "problem" digitally with my E-300 which is a spirit-successor of the Pen-FT. The 2x crop factor is worse than the Pen-FT, leaving me with ample supply of super high-quality short-teles and virtually no wide angle lenses to speak of.

Doug and Roland, nice pictures from the lenses.

The 25/2.8 is currently my favorite, it compares nicely with my current focal length of choice: 35mm on full frame cameras.

Here's an example:

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shadowfox said:
Raid, I have the exact "problem" digitally with my E-300 which is a spirit-successor of the Pen-FT. The 2x crop factor is worse than the Pen-FT, leaving me with ample supply of super high-quality short-teles and virtually no wide angle lenses to speak of.
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I have the E-330 and find the 11-22 F2.8/3.5 quite all-right. No, not the best combo I have/had but ok.

GLF
 
These are nice, Erik.

For anyone looking for the 25/2.8, the bartender is selling one in the classifieds for $300. Personally I am holding out for the 20.

Self-portrait with Pen FT, trying to look as dreadful as possible with my black eye:

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I keep debating whether I want to have mine de-metered and a better mirror installed...according to digitalintrigue, you can get an extra two stops of brightness this way. But it is nice to have the meter...
 
The 20 is extremely sharp, worth looking for! I'm intrigued by the possibility of a shiny new mirror by digitalintrigue. I had the impression changing the partially silvered mirror was a difficult job; hard to get to. How much are they charging for the change?

But another approach to the brighter finder is going with the Pen FV instead of the FT; already no meter and fully-silvered mirror...

Edit: By the way, that FT meter is awkward to use, IMO, and I'm happy to ignore it and use an incident meter in-hand instead... except where a TTL meter is really useful.
 
Well, an FT is what I have, and I think it's great! An FV is a rarity and thus more expensive.

I don't think Robert offers mirror replacement on Pens as part of his business--I think he just modified his own FT for his own use.
 
Doug said:
The 20 is extremely sharp, worth looking for! I'm intrigued by the possibility of a shiny new mirror by digitalintrigue. I had the impression changing the partially silvered mirror was a difficult job; hard to get to. How much are they charging for the change?
.
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It is a rather simple process once you know how to get the top off. If you have a source of front faced mirrors (an old slr maybe?) you can cut one yourself and install it. I've done it before.
When replacing, also clean the whole upper finder assembly from dust and get the black detoriating foam from around the eyepiece replaced or cleaned :). Replacing the focussing screen is the almost impossible task!

Iwert
 
ibcz said:
It is a rather simple process once you know how to get the top off. If you have a source of front faced mirrors (an old slr maybe?) you can cut one yourself and install it. I've done it before.
When replacing, also clean the whole upper finder assembly from dust and get the black detoriating foam from around the eyepiece replaced or cleaned :).
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A tutorial for this process would be welcome, if only in order to clean out the gunk.
 
mabelsound said:
A tutorial for this process would be welcome, if only in order to clean out the gunk.
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Seconded, I was casting about for one a few weeks ago and came up with nothing. I thought DigitalIntrigue was doing the FT mirror swap, but I sent him an e-mail a while ago through his new Wordpress site and didn't get a reply :-\
 
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