The Primest of the Primes: Panasonic Lumix 20mm f/1.7 Mark II

Important Update: I tested this lens with the Panasonic GX7 and I must say that the autofocus improved significantly. It no longer hunts for focus, and it also snaps very quickly, just like the rest of my MFT lenses. So it's safe to conclude that the use of this lens with older body such as the E-PL6 or anything before that may cause slow autofocus speed.
 

Hello all! Sorry for the lack of posts but with so much travelling and a lot of work recently it's kinda difficult for me to make time to write here. I do appreciate all of you who regularly visit this blog.

My E-PL6 with the 20mm, surrounded by the other lenses that I usually attach to it.

Today I want to talk about the stuff of the legend: Panasonic Lumix 20mm f1.7 Mark II. It's the second generation of the lens that has achieved cult status in Micro Four Thirds world. Delivering a field of view equivalent to 40mm in full frame, it is one of the most versatile lens for street photography as well as general walk-around all purpose prime lens.

Mounted on the E-PL6.

I bought it as a substitute for three of my lenses: Olympus 17mm f2.8, Olympus 17mm f1.8, and Olympus 25mm f1.8. All three of these lenses are fantastic, but sometimes I just wish they are blended together as a single lens rather than three separate lenses. I prefer a lens with the compactness of 17mm f2.8, but with the field of view that could mimic both 17mm and 25mm, with a fast aperture of at least f1.8. Voila, this lens showed up on an online camera shop, and I took the plunge and bought it immediately.

The Good Stuff?

It's very compact and easy to carry around!

It's extremely sharp! Holy, parking, cow! I don't pixel peep too often on my images, but even looking at normal viewing zoom, this lens is noticeably sharper than most of the lenses in my collection. I didn't expect a lens of this size and price to outperform many of my lenses, but it did and it just blew my mind away!

Shoot it at f1.7 and it's very sharp, stop it down a bit to f1.8 and the sharpness will improve. To get even sharper result on the lens, stop it down to at least f2. F2.8 will give you the optimum center sharpness quality, and f4 or f5.6 will give you excellent sharpness all across the frame. Diffraction starts to kick in at f8 and above, so avoid those aperture except if you really must have sufficient depth of field. I rarely stop down this lens and f1.7 never really gives me any sharpness issue.

Speaking of image quality, this lens also has a very good contrast. It is able to deliver images with deeper tone and you can really notice it without even pixel peeping. It's also quite resistant to flare and works really well in most lighting scenarios to generate good images, provided that you are shooting with adequate proper techniques.

It's also small, compact, and as small as the 17mm f2.8. Combined with smaller Micro Four Thirds bodies like my E-PL6, it now fits perfectly into my short pants' large pocket. It will definitely fit into regular jacket pocket and most certainly small bags. This kind of tiny lens with high level of performance on a very small form factor like this is almost unheard of in other camera formats and mounts!

The Bad Stuff...

Obviously, as you may have heard in many other review, the autofocus of this lens is kind of slow in low light, especially when combined with previous generation of Micro Four Thirds bodies like my E-PL6. It's fast in good light though, and the trick with this lens is to really look for contrasty part of the frame and focus on that to get a lock-on in low light conditions.

There is some little audible noise when you are focusing the lens, but it's not as bad as the Olympus 17mm f2.8. So it's not as over-hyped as people had said. Maybe the first generation of this lens is louder, but I'm not sure because I've never tried the older version of this lens. There is also some rattle-snake sound coming out in the audio when you are doing video using this lens, and many had said that it's cross brand compatibility issue that happens when you use Oly body like my E-PL6 with Pana lens. However, it also happened with my Olympus 17mm f1.8, so I think it's the problem that should be associated with the body itself, not with the lens.

Some people also said that they see some banding appearing on their images when they shoot this lens on an Olympus body at high ISO(above 800). I shot mine a lot on E-PL6 at ISO 1600 and 3200, and I didn't find any problem with banding whatsoever, I just couldn't find it in my images. That could be the problem of the older version of this lens that got fixed with this version of the lens. Or maybe my eyes aren't simply not sensitive enough to notice it.

To Sum It Up

The sweet story of this lens doesn't come up perfectly fine all the time. The autofocus mainly got me a bit bummed a few times as I have to wait for the lens to hunt the focus back and forth a few times or even sometimes I have to re-focus the lens multiple times to get the correct lock-on focus. But besides that, this is the lens is focusing as fast as the others in good light.

Many people complained about 20mm being not wide enough as they are used to 17mm(35mm equivalent) field of view. It's true, there is a noticeable difference of field of view between 17mm and 20mm and it's a significant difference that could make or break a shot. I personally always found the 17mm to be too wide most of the time so the 20mm really solves that problem, but you may feel different about it. So make sure you try to get the feel of 20mm before you make your decision.

So, is this lens able to substitute those three lenses as I mentioned before? Partially, yes. My 17mm f2.8 is now packed in its original box and ready to be sold soon. My 17mm f1.8 and 25mm f1.8 hasn't been used for a month since I use this lens. But I'm not ready to sell those primes yet as both the 17mm and 25mm f1.8 are very fast when it comes to focus speed, and my 20mm will never be able to rival those lens. The speed difference will matter the most when it comes to street photography under less than ideal light and in that kind of environment, I will want to rely on either my 17mm or 25mm instead of 20mm; but for anything else that doesn't require fast focusing, the 20mm will always be my choice.

See some of my sample images taken with this lens:

This is the field of view of 20mm. It could mimic either 17mm or 25mm.

See those details in the meat, my goodness it's just so sharp!

It's not wide enough, but so is the regular 17mm.

An attempt to get a street photo using this lens. Luckily the light is good so it doesn't hunt focus.

It's very good for general purpose walk-around lens.

Works well enough in contrasty scene.

This is the 20mm working to mimic the 17mm's wideness.

This is the kind of image that I am after with this lens.

I use it in studio environment too, and I love how flexible it is!

Environmental portrait with this lens is fantastic!

I don't know why, but I tend to use this lens for food photo

Let me know if you see some banding in this image. This was shot at very high ISO.

This was also shot at a very high ISO, I didn't notice any banding here.

I hope this post will help you to determine whether the 20mm f1.7 Mark II is the right lens for you or not. Also consider the older version of this lens if you decide that 20mm is the right lens for you as it is cheaper than the Mark II version. Until next post, cheers and God bless you :)

Important Update: I successfully managed to get the banding issue to appear on my shots! Horay! It's actually happening only and only when you take a picture in within just a few seconds, just after you coupled this lens with the camera and turning it on right away right after the coupling. The first few seconds of the shots after I coupled this lens with the camera finally showed some bands. But when you keep this lens on the body for so long without changing lens, the banding issue disappears again, even if you quickly turn on the camera and shoot right away.