The Olympus Zuiko Digital 25mm F2.8 Pancake lens was announced in March 2008 to coincide with the E-420 ultra-compact DSLR, and occupies a unique position in the current market as the only fixed focal length ('prime') lens which is bundled as a kit with a camera body. In this it harks back to the 1980s heyday of the classic manual focus 35mm SLR, when cameras were supplied with 50mm F1.8 (or similar) lenses as standard, with which budding photographers learned their art. That 25mm focal length also corresponds directly to 50mm on the 35mm full-frame format, offering the same diagonal angle of view; this is therefore of the 'standard' class of lenses, offering none of the perspective distortion which is characteristic of wideangle or telephoto lenses.
The word 'Pancake' in the lens's title offers a clue to its most striking physical characteristic; it is extremely thin (just 24mm, or less than 1") and extremely light, making it the perfect complement to Olympus's E-4x0 class bodies as an (almost) pocketable, carry-anywhere solution, with all the speed and responsiveness of a DSLR coupled with image quality unmatched by any small-sensor compact digicam. However it's not the slimmest lens currently available; that honour falls to Pentax's almost unimaginably thin SMC-DA 40mm F2.8, at a mere 15mm. Other brands also have their own small primes such as 28mm F2.8s or 35mm F2s, but a Canon EOS 1000D fitted with a 28mm F2.8 lens will be fully 25mm/1" (i.e. 33%) thicker than an E-420 with a 25mm F2.8; this combination really is about as small as it gets for DSLRs.
The 25mm Pancake is also a rare example of a truly 'designed for digital' standard prime; aside from the Sigma 30mm F1.4 HSM, Panasonic's Leica-branded 25mm F1.4 for Four Thirds, and the aforementioned Pentax 40mm F2.8, such lenses have been most noticeable by their absence, with the major camera manufacturers preferring instead to concentrate on more consumer-friendly zooms instead. As such it's a welcome example of one of the smaller players offering a genuine alternative unmatched by the likes of Canon and Nikon; however the big question is whether this lens really offers something sufficiently different to capture the imagination of buyers.
Andy Westlake
more : dpreview
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