Recently after much deliberation I sold all my Canon EOS x0D gear and purchased an Olympus PEN kit to replace it. By writing this series of articles I'm hoping to cover some of the more practical aspects of owning a PEN kit that the more spec-heavy reviews don't cover, especially for those contemplating replacing a DSLR.
The kit I've bought replaces most of the functionality that I used to have with my old EOS series. In this article I'll be concentrating on my choice between the two kit lenses available in the E-P3 kit.
Which kit lens?
If you're thinking of buying an E-P3 with a single kit lens you'll be presented with two options.
The Olympus M.Zuiko 17mm f/2.8 Pancake
They call it a "pancake" lens due to its extremely flat dimensions. It's ideal if you're keen to have a camera that slips into a medium sized jacket pocket, as the lens barely extends past the hand grip of the camera.
The fixed focal length of 17mm gives it an equivalent Field Of View (FOV) of 34mm on a 35mm film camera or 21.5mm on an APS-C camera like the Canon EOS 60D (from now on I'll refer to these in the short form like so, FOV equivalents: 35mm/Film = 34mm, APS-C = 21.5mm). This makes it a classic wide angle lens which is good for general purpose and not wide enough to create distorted portraits.
The Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R
This covers the 'traditional' range of standard zooms (FOV: 35mm/Film = 28-80mm, APS-C = 18-55mm) which covers most common subjects sensibly but with more flexibility than its prime counterpart. This too is a very small lens, but it's large enough to force you to use the camera in a very different way to the pancake. You definitely cannot fit this lens with the E-P3 into the average jacket pocket.
So why did I choose the zoom?
The pancake lens lets you carry the camera in more situations, offers a faster aperture and is typically sharper than a zoom. But the zoom lens gives you more significantly more versatility in framing your photographs. For me the choice came down to two issues, the image quality and the fact that after being used to much larger cameras I did not care about the size difference.
If you read detailed comparisons from dpreview, photozone etc you'll see that the 17mm doesn't perform fantastically in terms of image quality despite being a prime. If you then compare the prime to the zoom (sometimes regarded as the best kit zoom currently on the market), you'll see similar or better performance from the zoom. So it then begged the question: if I don't care about the size, the aperture difference is negligible and the image quality was equal or worse than the zoom, why go for the prime? And so my decision was made.
