This may be old news to most of you, but it was a revelation to me. It
happened like this:
I was swapping email with an OM defector - he was dumping his OM gear in
favor of another system.
He said, "Yeah, that Zuiko glass is nice - all those fast primes are great.
But you know, it disappoints me that none of them are actually f2 at their
widest aperture. Look closely at the aperture scale and you'll see that the
end of the scale is marked with a white line which *precedes* f2. You can
use the camera's meter to corroborate this. You'll see that an adjustment
from 2.8 to 2 by turning the aperture ring to its wide open position does
*not* gain you a full stop. All of my coveted, fast primes were the same
way - the 21, 24, 28, 50 Macro, and 100. I couldn't believe it. It's one of
the reasons I'm getting out."
I replied to him thusly:
"You're crazy. If Zuiko sold a lens with a misleading maximum aperture,
they'd be hung out to dry..."
Of course, I then examined the one f2 Zuiko that I own (85/2) and I saw
that he wasn't crazy at all.
So, to all of you, I pose this question: What gives???
Please reply to this post directly, if you would. I don't always have time
to sift through the long digest. Thanks.
Oh, yeah. I will buy some of those fast primes with the little white
line in front of the wide open stop. They will go with my F2.8s with
the white lines.
Seriously, the white line is pointing to the clickstop and would not
be needed if Oly printed the F stop numbers small enough to evenly
space them around the ring. Unfortunately they would then be so small
that not all of us could read them. Oly has a lot of lenses that are
not full F stops, but they are labelled so, like the 300/F4.5 or the
50/F1.2.
Winsor
--
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California, USA
mailto:wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx
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