The One Lens to Rule Them All!

If I can only carry one camera and one lens with me (obviously with MFT you can carry 5 lenses and 2 bodies and you will still weight less than 2kg), it will be the Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 on my GX7. It is the ultrazoom lens that can cover everything from moderate wide angle to moderate telephoto.

My beloved GX7 with the Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm f/3.5-5.6. That lens is always on my GX7 70% of the time.

As we all know with ultrazooms, they always lack the sharpness and contrast and often come with very slow aperture. Well this one eliminates the first two problems although it still has some quite slow aperture. I like it and I took so many incredible pictures with it!

Some things that I find very good in this lens are:

1. The image stabilization. Coming from Tamron 18-270mm and 70-300mm VC, the image stabilization in Tamron lenses are top notch! This lens, although doesn't stabilize as good as the Tamrons, is not bad at all; in fact I can zoom all the way to 140mm(280mm full frame) and have a blur free picture at 1/30 of a second!

2. The sharpenss. It is quite sharp at all focal length. At 14mm, stop down to f5.6 and behold a sharp wide angle picture; at 140mm, stop down to f8 and it will be very sharp.

3. Color and contrast. They are quite good in this lens, it doesn't degrade your image too much and is quite good for my needs.

4. The size and build quality. My goodness, coming from Tamron 18-270mm, that lens is gigantic! This lens is barely bigger than my Canon 18-55mm II! It is also has a nice build quality with smooth zoom and focusing ring(albeit MFT focus-by-wire style focus mechanism).

Some things that I don't like about this lens:

1. There's a strong shadow on the foreground when I use the built in GX7 flash together with this lens. It is because the lens is blocking the light path of the flash I suppose.

2. It's expensive! Fortunately, it is justified by the kind of image quality that you are getting from this superzoom lens. A Canon 18-200mm or Nikon 18-200mm won't give you the same sharpness of this lens.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: There have been a lot of people talking about "Shutter Shock" issue of this lens especially when combined with the GX7. Unfortunately, it is true and I also suffer from that thing :( . However, that problem only occurs when you are in the range of approximately 1/20 to 1/200 sec shutter speed in my case which unfortunately also is the range of shutter speed that I use most often during daytime with ISO 200. Try to avoid those shutter speeds or just switch on your Electronic Shutter. With the electronic shutter, it is as sharp as it should be. This shouldn't bother you too much if you don't pixel peep though :)

Here are some pictures that I took with this lens:

This photo of Shanghai's old and new is taken at 14mm. Not bad, eh?

The cliche tree picture with some sun flare! The flare is controlled very well and the chromatic aberration is very minimum.

Trying to capture the Shanghai Tower(2nd tallest building in the world) with 14mm from a close proximity is quite challenging but fun.

Trying to capture three tall skyscrapers together in one shot is even more challenging!

Long range daytime street photography is a breeze with this lens. 

The flexibility of the variable focal length without too much compromise is very handy especially during travel.

I admit I do a little Lightroom post processing, but I swear I didn't crank the contrast slider on this picture!

A very compressed street photo. The 140mm(280mm eq) focal length of this lens is quite far and thus compresses image very well.

Back to wide angle 14mm(28mm eq).

The lens isn't big on the GX7, it stays inconspicuous and thus enabling you to get this kind of shots.

Distortion is negligible, so it is safe to use for architectural shot like this.

It focuses as close as 1ft or 30cm even at 140mm, so you can have a semi macro performance on this lens. Sweet!!

I hope you enjoy this post. Cheers and God bless :)

Follow my Google+: plus.google.com/+GaryWiryawan for more photos!