As many of you may know, Panasonic recently came out with a new wide angle lens in their high end Pan-Leica line, the 8-18 f2.8-f4. It's weather sealed like the Oly 7-14 Pro, but unlike other wide lenses it takes filters- a very nice touch for landscape photographers who like to hunt waterfalls. I figured losing a mm on the wide end was an easy trade-off to get 18mm on the long end, so I sold my Oly 7-14 before it depreciated too much more in the face of competition from the newer option. I also lose f2.8 at anything over 8mm, but in my case it's no big deal; I have the Oly 8mm for astro and the 12-40 if I really need f2.8 from 12mm on up. This lens should be great for getting reefscapes and fish portraits on the same dive.
I received a copy this week, and I managed to do some quick tests in the bathtub- nothing scientific, more of a proof of concept than anything. The good news is that this lens seems to work fine with my E-M1, Oly housing, and Inon 170mm dome with 2" extension- this is the same set up that I use for the 7-14 and 12-40 Pro lenses. It locked focus at both 8mm and 18mm, although the closest focus distance was about 8" from the front of the dome. This is a little further away than I can get with the Pro zooms, but still something I can live with, and still doable for CFWA with the right subjects. Performance wasn't great wide open (no surprise), but it seemed to be plenty sharp stopped down
As you can imagine, it's always a pain being an early adopter- there's no such thing as a zoom gear yet, for instance. One problem that already came up is that my copy is revoltingly soft on the left side of the image, so it will be returned soon. I'm seeing similar complaints on other forums, so I think the first couple of batches have some spotty QC. Hopefully this will improve with time.
