Testing the 75-300

WARNING ... WARNING .... TECH BLIP .... WARNING .... TECH BLIP

I am thinking about buying an Olympus M.Zuiko  f4.8-6.7 75-300mm lens to go with my EM5. Because it is set up for a micro four thirds sensor, its full frame equivalence is actually 150-600mm!!!! Gee. Anyway I have had less than stellar experiences with long lenses before and so I am treading carefully. Back then of course camera bodies couldn't realistically be pushed upwards of 800 ISO and of course the lenses were huge and unwieldy. Consequently, holding long lenses steadily with viable shutter speeds used to be a big ask and mushy images were many.

Right now, Olympus m4/3 OMD bodies manage ISO 3200 pretty well however and that should help with higher shutter speeds. Then again this 75-300 M.Zuiko zoom is a tiny fraction of the weight and bulk that such glass used to be, so I should be able to prevent it moving over much. Likewise OMD bodies are reckoned to provide more than 3 stops worth of stabilisation, these days.

Anyway I went down to Harvey Norman and arranged to test a real, live 75-300 on my own camera. The light was low but there were numerous text oriented subjects to be shot (at the other end of the cavernous store) which might be expected to reveal any sharpness issues. I set the ISO to 2500, set the focal length to 300mm (ff.eq 600mm) and fired off about a dozen frames, steadying myself to the max each time. The golden rule says that at this focal length the shutter speed should be at least 1/600 sec but I thought the results were acceptable anyway.

I wanted to eliminate potential acuity issues that the lens was not responsible for and so processing was restricted to a light noise reduction and to basic exposure correction. There is no pp sharpening at all.

I have a lot more research to do but ... well ... what do you reckon so far? Should I take the plunge? If any of you out there have had experience with this lens, I'd be most grateful for your input.