If you’re looking at getting a 12-100mm zoom lens for your Olympus / OM-System camera, you might be wondering what that zoom range looks like in real-world terms.
The numbers are plain enough — 12mm zoomed out to 100mm zoomed in. But what does that mean in practice?
Because there’s more than the lens optics involved; you also have to factor in the size of the sensor. So a 12-100mm on an Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera body isn’t going to be the same as a 12-100mm lens on a full-frame DSLR or mirrorless camera.
A Micro Four Thirds camera has a sensor that’s larger than most point-and-shoot compact cameras but smaller than an APS-C or full-frame sensor.1 And that means that the Micro Four Thirds cameras have a crop factor of 2x (as a technical matter, it’s a shade less, but 2x is the practical number to use).
So a 12-100mm lens on a Micro Four Thirds camera is equivalent to a 24-200mm lens on a full-frame camera.
One thing worth being clear about: the crop factor changes the framing, not the lens. It’s still a 12-100mm lens and it’s still f/4, so the exposure at f/4 is the same as f/4 on any other camera — the 2x figure only tells you how much of the scene you’re capturing. Where it does bite is depth of field: shooting at f/4 on Micro Four Thirds gives you roughly the depth of field you’d get at f/8 on a full-frame camera framed the same way.
But what does that mean in a real-world, visual sense?
Here are some practical examples. I took all of these with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO lens on an Olympus OM-1 body.
Price & availability of the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO lens
The Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO lens has an MSRP of $1299.
It’s been around since late 2016, and it’s still in the current lineup and sold new — now under the OM System brand rather than Olympus. Prices move around with sales and rebates, so it’s worth checking what it’s actually going for rather than assuming the MSRP.
Accessories for the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO zoom lens
It takes 72mm screw-on filters: Polarizer | UV/Haze | Neutral Density
It comes with a lens hood, but if you need a replacement, the model number is LH-76B.
There’s no model-specific lens case, but there’s a huge range of lens cases available that will work well, from neoprene soft cases to heavy-duty hard cases. When looking to see which lens cases will fit, the dimensions of the lens when retracted (i.e., zoomed out to its smallest physical size) are: 3.05 inches / 77.5mm diameter and 4.59 inches / 116.5 mm long.
Notes & References:
- The typical dimensions of a standard Four Thirds sensor are 18 mm × 13.5 mm (22.5 mm diagonal), with an imaging area of 17.3 mm × 13.0 mm (21.63 mm diagonal). It is possible for variations of this while still conforming to the Four Thirds standard (usually through a different aspect ratio). [↩︎]
