Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH, worth buying used?

One of my friend thought he got a great deal out of eBay (Aust) a few weeks ago, he paid an equivalent of NZD240.00 for this three year old  Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH.
Since I used to review Panasonic cameras and lenses , he also would like my opinion on how good this preloved high speed "normal" lens for M43 system is.

This "pancake" lens actually has a long history, Panasonic presents their large (F1.7) aperture "pancake" 20mm (40mm equivalent) lens as the kit lens for the Lumix DMC-GF1 camera in 2010, TEN years ago.

I wrote about this lens, which I still got in Jan 2014; I reckoned then this is the Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH, the "Perfect Normal" Lens.

The Lumix 20mm was placed beside a SD card to show how small it is.
With a focal length equal to the M43 sensor's diagonal; this compact optics will produce images free of the 'perspective distortion' associated with wide angle or telephoto lenses!




The 20mm on the tiny GM1

Rewinding to ten days ago, weather was fine and Le Gen and Mua headed to Wellington Botanical Garden to check out whatever were the remain of the tulips.

I took the opportunity to bring along the 20mm with my Lumix GX85.

I shot all the test shot on full f1.7 or f2.8 to show the ability and incredible sharpness of this small wonder.

Each shot you see here were then crop to 100% enlargement to show the spot-on focus and the blow-up-ability.










Well, the beautiful results, sharpness spoke for themselves!

As for the stunning pano, I never shot any pano with a 20mm before, silly me thought it was no good for this mode!  So I took ONE shot and WOW! I should have taken more.

Famous Last Words...

I really like this pancake!  I like it's creamy bokeh, it's accurate colour rendition; it's sharpness even when wide open.

I am not so fond of it's rather slow auto focus, but this is a 10 year old lens... and the lack of built-in image stabiliser, well, use it with cameras with stabiliser.

As far as I know a brand new one cost NZD449 at Photowarehouse, the 20mm came in a "Mk2" version for a few years now.

I told my anxious friend he got a good bargain indeed!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi CY, How are you going in lockdown? Don't have your email address, flick me an eamil when you get a chance,
Nigel

Unknown said...

Hi CY & Babe, scrolled thru old emails to find your blog so I could contact you, as no reply to your gmail email. How r u both? Drop me a line when u can. Best wishes Bruce

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