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Gear guidance for my next step

cjlacz

Member
I've had my Oly E-510 for about a year and I want to move up a bit, a new lens or two, but I've gotten really confused which way to go and maybe someone can give me a little perspective to set me straight.

I shot with someone using a Nikon D300 and 50 or 85 1.4 (mostly) and the 80-200 2.8. I liked the way it blurred out the cluttered backgrounds in Tokyo and how he could pull out a person from the crowd. I know Oly doesn't have the same DoF, but would I be able to do pretty well with this on the 50-200 or 35-100? I can plug the numbers into the DoF calculators. Sometimes the difference looks big, but it's hard to know how big those differences are in real life. How much of a difference would there be between the two (50-200, 35-100)? I know the 35-100 is big and expensive, but at least as long as I'm here in Japan I know I could get a lot of use out of it if I choose to buy it.

I originally went with Oly for the smaller cameras and lenses, but micro four-thirds kind of threw a monkey wrench in my plans. That's the system I really wanted from 4/3s. They don't have the lenses I'm looking for though and I don't know when they'd come out.

I kind of see three options, but I don't really have the practical experience to see the pro-cons between them.

1. Stick with Oly even though the fast primes and zooms are fairly expensive, but great quality. I love the dust buster and flip out screens on the E-3 or E-30. It's great you can use the lenses on the E-xxx too.

2. Buy a used Nikon, a couple primes and maybe the 80-200. Cheap in the short term, but I probably won't stick with it. The bodies and lenses are just too heavy. Would give me time to watch m4/3s development.

3. Go with m4/3s and buy adapters and use other lenses for some fast primes.

I'm not desperate to buy anything right now, but by March or April I'll be shopping for sure. Is there a good reason I should wait a bit?

Any thoughts you have would be welcome. A lot of you seem to think the G1 is the way in the future and seems like a few sold your 4/3s systems. I'm tempted to grunt and bare it and put up with the G1 until more lenses come out. Hopefully the ones I want. *fingers crossed*
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
How well does the m4/3 system with manual focus and stop down primes work with fast moving street type photography? For myself it would be a disaster trying to focus wide open primes on moving subjects, the advantage of using a regular AF system with fast primes, for all that it's bigger and heavier is that you can focus on a moving subject at f2 and rely on it to get the focus right more often than not.
 

cjlacz

Member
Yeah, manual focus wouldn't work well for moving targets. ;)

I'm going to wait to see some of the reviews of the E30, but I'm pretty sure I'll stick with 4/3s and m4/3s. Hopefully they improved AF in dim light. The DoF difference isn't as large as I expected compared to APS-C sensors. I still kind of cringe at the cost/size of some of the current primes, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope Oly starts to rectify that this year. Buying into Nikon would be cheaper in the short term, but it's still a lot of money to spend on a system I'm not that interested in.
 
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