Olympus wowed us last year with its first f/1.2 prime lens, a standard-angle 25mm prime with excellent build quality and optics. Now photographers who crave a wider angle can benefit from the same bright aperture, build quality, and top-end imaging with the Olympus M.Zuiko ED 17mm f1.2 PRO ($1,199). Like its 25mm and 45mm siblings it is sturdily built, with a metal barrel, manual focus clutch, and weather sealing, and like them it earns our Editors' Choice. It's the lens to get if you're a fan of a moderately wide angle of view and crave the depth of field control offered by an extremely wide aperture. If your budget is tighter, or you put more of a value on a compact, lightweight design, don't forget about the M.Zuiko Digital ED 17mm f1.8, which is a strong performer in its own right.

Design

Olympus set the design motif for the f1.2 PRO series with its first release, the 25mm f1.2. The 17mm is about the same size, coming in at 3.4 by 2.7 inches (HD) and 13.8 ounces, with support for 62mm front filters. Compare that with the svelte 17mm f1.8, which covers the same angle of view but only gathers about 40 percent as much light at its widest f-stop. The 17mm f1.8 is 1.4 by 2.3 inches and weighs 4.2 ounces.

But it's not just the extra light that sets the 17mm f1.2 apart from the smaller f1.8 lens. The f1.2 PRO is sealed against dust and moisture, so it pairs well with cameras with weather sealing. That's good, because you really want to pair the big lens with a body with a deeper handgrip like the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II or Panasonic G9. It will be a bit front heavy on smaller, slimmer cameras.

The 17mm is housed in a black metal barrel with silver and blue rings toward the front. A reversible lens hood is included, as are caps and a soft carrying pouch. There is a lone control button on the barrel, marked L-Fn—its function can be set by an Olympus camera. Unlike some Micro Four Thirds lenses, there is no optical stabilization built in. Instead the 17mm relies on the in-body stabilization offered by Olympus cameras. Thankfully the system is effective for the wide angle—about 35mm in full-frame terms—captured by the lens.

The knurled metal focus ring occupies much of the barrel. To switch to manual focus you pull it back toward you. Because of the design, the lens delivers solid resistance and tactile feedback when focusing manually, with hard stops at the minimum focus distance and infinity. It's a departure from many mirrorless lenses, which typically have focus rings that turn continuously without any additional resistance.

Close focus is available to 7.9 inches (0.2-meter). The wide field of view means that the lens is hardly useful for macro shots, but you can still get pretty close to your subject. At the closest focus distance it projects subjects onto the image sensor at 1:6.7 life-size. That's about twice as large as the Olympus 17mm f1.8 ($349.00 at Amazon) , which focuses to 9.8 inches and captures subject at 1:12.5 at its closest focus setting.

Image Quality

I tested the 17mm f1.2 with the 20MP OM-D E-M1 Mark II. The lens delivers very sharp results from edge to edge, even when shot wide open. At f/1.2 it scores 2,643 lines on a standard center-weighted Imatest sharpness test. Resolution is strong right up to the edges of our test chart, which show 2,618 lines. These are excellent numbers for a 20MP camera; we consider results to be acceptable at 1,800 lines.

Resolution is steady at f/1.4, with 2,679 lines. It plateaus early, showing the strongest results at f/2 (2,820 lines), f/2.8 (2,851 lines), and f/4 (2,860 lines). There's a negligible drop at f/5.6 (2,728 lines). You lose a little bit of clarity at f/8 (2,585 lines) and f/11 (2,322 lines), but you should feel free to use them when you need a larger depth of field. You should avoid shooting at the minimum aperture, f/16, as diffraction drops the score to 1,827 lines.

See How We Test Digital Cameras

Olympus touts the quality of the bokeh, the out-of-focus area behind your subject, describing it as feathered. I recommend taking any claims of bokeh quality with a grain of salt. The distance between camera and subject, in conjunction with the makeup and distance between subject and background, and of course the working aperture, all contribute to how the background of your image looks. You can certainly blur out backgrounds with the 17mm at wider apertures, and I didn't note any oddities in backgrounds in shots with a shallow depth of field.

The sequence above, shot handheld (apologies for the slight changes in framing), is just one example of how the lens draws a scene from f/1.2 through its minimum f/16 aperture. I was working reasonably close to the minimum focus distance, in order to blur out the background as much as possible. But remember that this is a 17mm lens, so you're going to start to see distant subjects take shape at wider apertures.

The lens doesn't show any distortion. There is some corner dimness at wider apertures, but it's not extreme. We see a -1.4EV drop at f/1.2 and -1.1EV at f/1.4. This gives scenes a very modest. but visible, vignette. At narrower settings the vignette is barely noticeable, and then gone. We see -0.9EV at f/2, -0.7EV at f/2.8, and from f/4 and beyond a completely negligible -0.4EV.

Conclusions

The Olympus M.Zuiko ED 17mm f1.2 PRO doesn't offer quite the same amount of depth of field control as a good 35mm f/1.4 lens on a full-frame system, but it comes fairly close, and it does so while delivering extremely crisp results from edge to edge. And while it's larger for a Micro Four Thirds lens, it does well with the pro-level bodies with which it's likely to be paired. It earns our Editors' Choice, and should be at the top of the list for M43 photographers who love the 35mm angle of view and crave the best image quality available, with build quality to match. It is a little pricey, so if you're on a budget, prefer a lighter lens, and don't need weather sealing, take a look at the more affordable Olympus 17mm f1.8 as an alternative.

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