While checking the new lens deals I noticed that the Black Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens has been marked as discontinued at BHphoto (Click here). I guess the “limited edition” premium strategy from Olympus didn’t work out. Changing color isn’t a “premium” thing unless your company name is LEICA 🙂
Current Panasonic/Olympus/Sigma/SLRmagic US deals:
$100 off on the Leica Nocticron got a $100 off at Amazon, Adorama and Bhphoto.
$100 off on the Leica Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 at Amazon, Adorama and Bhphoto.
$40 off on the Leica 25mm f/1.4 Summilux at Amazon US, Adorama and BHphoto.
Tamron MFT lens at Adorama in Black (Click here) and Silver (Click here) and at BHphoto in Black (Click here) and Silver (Click here).
$200 off on the Panasonic GX7 with kit lens at Amazon (Click here), Adorama (Click here) and BHphoto (Click here).
The Panasonic GX1 with 12-42mm X lens sells for $499 only at Amazon (Click here).
Preorders of the Handevsion 40mm f/0.85 lens at BHphoto (Click here) and [shoplink 46482 ebay]German eBay Store (Click here)[/shoplink].
$30 of on the 19mm f/2.8 ART at Amazon, Adorama and BHphoto.
$30 of on the 30mm f/2.8 ART at Amazon, Adorama and BHphoto.
SLR Magic 25mm T0.95 Hyperprime Cine Lens,II Micro Four Thirds (MFT) Mount at Adorama.
SLR Magic 17mm T1.6 Lens Micro Four Thirds Mount at Adorama.
$100 off on the Panasonic 12-35mm X lens at Adorama and BHphoto.
$100 off on the Panasonic 35-100mm f/2.8 Lumix G Vario Zoom Lens at Amazon, Adorama and Bhphoto.
Current Olympus deals can be seen at GetOlympus (Click here) and Amazon Olympus page (Click here).
44 Responses
Uhm. Of course Olympus has to discontinue the black 12mm if it’s a limited edition. D’uh. If they didn’t discontinue it, it wouldn’t be limited. Now only the silver version is on the market with a LIMITED amount of black lenses in circulation.
Exactly! I don’t understand why a limited edition being sold out should be surprising to anyone. It would have been a failure if they didn’t sell all of them.
That sold out years ago.
That Olympus labelled the black edition “limited” when it came out doesn’t make the decision to offer only a silver version less stupid.
They have been offering a number of their other lenses in black at the same price as the silver ones with no price difference. Offering the 12 mm in black at a large price differential was a poor marketing move.
The standard version should be black in the first place. The silver 12mm must be one of the ugliest lenses ever 🙂 Of course looking good is not the primary purpose of this lens… yet I feel most people would rather opt for black color if Oly weren’t charging $300 just for a paint job and lens hood.
On my silver EM10 looks really good 🙂
Funny conclusion. I’ve always thought that limited meant you have to limit production and, yes, discontinue it.
If it’s a limited edition, does that not rather mean that they have to stop production at some point, or else how is it limited?
I wonder how limited it was that it took nearly two years to get rid of them all
Good riddance to customer hostile marketing. It should have been offered as an option at the same price as the silver. Going after the high end is one thing. Gouging is another. Between this and the rumored decision to hold back firmware enhancements to existing users, Olympus is squandering a lot of potential good will earned from their otherwise outstanding products. Wake up and super serve your fans, Oly!
I think the whole 12mm strategy was horrible. Expensive hood, overpriced lens with huge distortion, even more overpriced black version.
I would very much like to own the 12mm, but the PL 15mm is a better performer for less money.
Olympus should have come up with a more coherent lens strategy in the first place. Their initial f/1.8 and f/2.0 primes should have been of consistent design and targeted as moderate priced upgrades to the kit zooms. Next, they should have developed more premium f/1.4, 1.2 or 1.0 premium lens lines at the same focal lengths. Maybe 12mm, 17mm, 25mm, 45mm and 75mm with a consistent look at f/1.8, f/1.4 and f/1.0. The 12mm f/1.0 should probably cost about $800-1000. The f/1.8 should be more like $350-400. This kind of a strategy makes a great deal of sense on a system like MFT which requires fast lenses.
Their zoom strategy makes no sense to me either. With FT, they set out to design zooms which were faster than their full frame counterparts…a sound strategy considering the sensor. The f/2.0 zooms on FT made a lot of sense. With MFT, they instead went with f/2.8 zooms which make considerably less sense.
The premium FT lenses were almost as big as their FF counterparts, which made the whole FT camera system a bit of a head-scratcher when it wasn’t much smaller than the Canon and Nikon systems.
f/2.8 seems to be the sweet spot where you get reasonable speed with a much smaller lens than the FF field-of-view equivalent lens.
I agree that f/2.8 is a sweet spot for a kit lens on MFT. It’s just not fast enough to compete with FF f/2.8 glass. That, and the 12-40 from Olympus is much larger and heavier than its design should dictate. Panasonic released a similar lens that’s much lighter.
In my opinion, Olympus should have made a budget f/2.8-x kit zoom, somewhat larger than the 14-42 but still light and portable. Then they should have designed a faster line of pro lenses. I agree that they’d be heavy, but not too much heavier than the current 12-40.
Have to agree. I really like the newer 17mm and 25mm 1.8 primes, which to me are more pleasing and have better balance on the EM5. They should have kept the same 46mm filter size for the 1.8 budget range from the outset — the 45mm now looks weedy and out of place.
The 12mm, well, maybe they should never have come out with a budget one in the first place. Then again, they have been haphazard since the 4/3 days, as if they make things up as they went along.
My take is Olympus should offer 2 ranges of primes:
1. Cheap budget range covering classic “trinity” 28-40-90mm equivalents. f1.8 and 46mm filters for all. Designed to match Pens and EM5/10, cosmetically designed for blingbling consumers.
2. Pro range of higher quality, _fully weathersealed_ set of 20-24-35-50-60 Macro-90-100 Macro-150mm. f1.0 to f1.4 with 52mm filters. Designed to look like serious tools (ie, “normal looking lenses”) for EM1 and future Pro cameras.
1. 17mm f/2.8, 25mm f/1.8, 45mm f/1.8
2. 12mm f/2.0, 17mm f/1.8, 60mm f/2.8 macro, 75mm f/1.8
Seems like Olympus is doing that.
f/1.8 is too slow for a premium lens on MFT. Heck, it’s too slow for a premium lens on FF. 😉 f/1.8 is budget speed, even on a large sensor.
No, they’re not. It is self evident in your own post:
1. Their apertures are all over the place.
2. Not to mention the filter sizes even within range (1).
3. And is list (2) supposed to be the _weathersealed_ range of Pro primes with f1.4 apertures?
In fact, you just managed to show us that excepting the 12mm f2.0, all the lenses above belong in the cheap category.
In other formats, camera makers standardise their lens ranges. According to aperture, and also filter size. Pentax with their 49mm filters, Nikon and primes with 52mm / 58mm filters, etc. Standardisation makes things look like a coherent system, not an afterthought.
Worst marketing decision ever, creating a color scheme for a high end lens that only matches one low-end body, and then charging extra for the color that should be standard and looks right on everything else. I would love to own this lens, but I don’t on principle. I’m not paying extra for what should be the normal color. I could almost accept it if were the same silver as the 45 or 75, but it’s that hideous yellowish silver that they thankfully got rid of a long time ago… except for this lens.
The 12mm limited edition was made in Japan as the first silver version. Now they are made in china.
Strange world. I would never buy a silver gear and never would pay a cent extra for the black.
Oops my LS-11 recorder is silver but I seldom use it anymore the black Tascam is better.
Well, no one will care anyways once the wide zoom with a proper color is out. It’s not even difficult for a zoom to surpass the 12mm f2. The product manager for this weird-ass strategy must have been the same guy who came up with that weird random stuff like wooden grips on Pens and such.
Panasonic has the right idea for at least some of their MFT lenses: Make them a “silver gray” so that they are NOT quite silver and not quite black … but they go equally well with silver and black camera bodies. When I can’t buy the Panasonic’s neutral “fashion statement”, I try to buy silver for primes and black for long zooms. I guess silver primes remind me of the days when lenses were actually made out of metal.
I really wished they would just get real and offer a black version of the 12mm f/2. Ridiculous to mark up so high and not offer it in both black & silver. Is it really that hard and special to make in black? Nearly all their MFT lenses have both color options without any special pricing, same thing.. if anything, silver should be special since they make more black colored lenses than silver overall. just make it in black as well already at the same price as the silver one… talking about price, can we get it less expensive now that it’s been out for so long?.. i think one of the oldest premium primes for MFT from olympus.. $800 for it seems a bit steep still, imho.
Fuji did the same thing with their X100, now you can get it the latest X100S in black at no extra charge. Do something really special instead of color to justify a few $100 markup. Otherwise, make both options available at a reasonable price and keep your customers happy. Thanks.
If it’s getting out of stock it means they have sold enough and it has worked.
Was a waste of cash anyway.
The GX1 with X lens is $792.40 at Amazon. It’s the conventional 14-42 kit which is $499. You’ve been mis-stating this since last week.
m43 Lenses are terrible overpriced
especially the 12mm, 42.5, 75mm,
they should all be priced similar to P 14mm, O 17mm, P 20, P/O 25mm, O 45mm
of course you can just ignore those expensive lenses
Why should they be priced the same?
…They are optically much faster, with more complex optical designs, much faster AutoFocus, that includes one lens with optical image stabilization. If you compare these lenses against their F-stop/Field-of-View equivalents in FF 35mm format, the pricing is appropriate. ( smaller m43 lenses also require higher performance to compete against the larger FF lenses, which means that physical construction tolerances must tighter, which costs more to produce )
That would be true if the F stop did the same job as on FF , it doesn’t to match an F1.2 on FF with a mFT lens you need an f0.6 lens. It is not just DOF but total light gathered. However you care to twist it the fact is taht a lens for a smaller format uses a fraction of the expensive optical glass and components of same aperture FF lenses. How do the following numbers fit with your theory
Nikon 32mm F1.2 £650
Fujifilm 56mm F1.2 £840
Panasonic 42.5mmF1.2 £1200
The cheap Nikon 85mm F1.8G whether mounted on the 16mp DF/D4s ,the 24mp D610 or 36mp D880/E will outperform the 42.5mm. Higher resolution, sharpness, lower distortion ,better DOF control and so on.The 42.5mm has very high chr aberration for a lens at this price point. In fact you can get a D610+ 85mm for almost £700 less than the E-M1 + 42.5mm or a D800 +85mm F1.8g for £150 less than the E-M1 + Pany combo.
http://www.dxomark.com/Lenses/Compare/Side-by-side/Nikon-AF-S-NIKKOR-85mm-F18G-on-Nikon-Df-versus-Nikon-AF-S-NIKKOR-85mm-F18G-on-Nikon-D800E-versus-Panasonic-Leica-DG-Nocticron-42-5mm-F12-ASPH-on-Olympus-OM-D-E-M1___823_925_823_814_1297_909
If you don’t like MFT system, why you are here? And a 1.4 on mft, catch the same light of a 1.4 on a FF. Change the DOF, but DOF in not all in photography. Capa, Bresson and other photographers didn’t shoot with the canon 85mm 1.2! Or the Canon 50mm 1.0.
Guys, the trolls are so persistent on this site that they must also be shills. Don’t feed them. It’s pointless. And I thought things were bad in computer format wars.
Well, HCB had a summarex (85 @1.5) that he loved, and Capa used a 50 sonnar 1.5 (maybe the fastest 50 at this time) …
These equivalence talks always get messy. For instance, if you crop a FF photo in Photoshop, do you feel like you’re reducing the camera’s light-gathering capability? Because that’s what crop sensor does, F-numbers being equal. True, if we were to downsample the whole FF photo we’d have more pixels to work with and comparatively less noise but how many people think of it this way?
DOF equivalence is meaningless, as pretty much all photographers and film-makers around the world are concerned with proper exposure for their images, so a f/1.2 lens is ALWAYS a f/1.2 lens, no matter what the focal length or DOF of the lens is.
When you use ANY light-meter ever made you enter three variables to obtain correct exposure: F-Stop, Shutter-Speed, and ISO rating. And this applies to EVERY lens and EVERY camera ever made.
So if correct exposure requires f/1.2 at 1/60 sec and ISO 3200, this exposure applies to EVERY camera no matter what the sensor size is or what the focal-length of the lens is. If you try to use a f/1.8 lens at 1/60 sec and ISO 3200 you FAIL. UNDER EXPOSED IMAGE.
I understand physics is hard, but persisting in your errors won’t make you look any smarter.
Getting beyond tiresome. These equivalence tarts are what comes out when the universe farts. In f1.4 “full frame”, of course.
So what? I could care less if it is the same equivalence on light gathering as long as it is a well made, dependable lens. That is what set prices apart on the m43 lineup (regardless of brand).
We have seen a number of FF lenses f/1.8 or 1.4 primes that are very soft and such. Just because the DOF is different on FF does not mean it is a better lens, that really depends on the individual. Dont like m43? Perfectly fine and nothing wrong with that, I am sure you shoot happily every day making awesome photos with your current system.
No one cares. I own thousands of dollars worth of expensive lenses. Full frame, micro, medium format. It doesn’t matter until you quantify your argument in terms of application. These garbage worthless arguments go on for the ignorant people who fail to realize its all relative. Total light gathered is only one facet of the total equation…and a poor one at that.
What a really, really odd comment. You’re under the impression that lenses are all uniformly priced in other systems, we take it? You mean fast wide angles and fast portrait lenses are never more expensive than more common standard lenses like a 50mm 2.0 or 35mm 2.8?
Go to another Blog!
I think those overpriced lenses are there to show off and justify the (still high) prices of the lowlier products. Seriously, who would ever waste all that money on a tiny, software-corrected camera? Apart from the usual marketing trolls, of course.
Have to buy black 45 before they will be discontinued too.