Best travel camera

[Black Pearl]

That will depend to a degree on the body you put it on and what file format you typically shoot. Modern digital cameras correct for lateral CA's, vignetting and optical distortions but typically only for their own lenses and for the JPEG files out of the camera. If thats how you shoot putting an Olympus lens on an Olympus body (or vice-verse) might be a good option. If you shoot raw then its going to be down to your software and what profiles or manual corrections it has available.

[Manfred M]

Hi Dave thanks for your opinion. Panasonic 100-300mm or Olympus 75-300mm which one will be better?

On which camera body? Olympus goes purely for in body stabilization, so either lens will work on the body, but the Olympus lenses do not have in-lens stabilization. Panasonic tends to go for in lens stabilization and some of their more recent bodies do both (even at the same time). If you go for a Panny body, Panasonic lenses are a better option. From what I can see on the Panasonic website, there are no plans to upgrade the in-lens firmware 100 - 300mm lens so that it can use both in lens and in body stabilization at the same time.

From a pure lens performance standpoint, lenses that have a lower zoom ratio tend to be stronger performers from an optical standpoint as the lens designer has fewer constraints to worry about. If you look at "pro" lenses, they rarely exceed a 3x zoom capability, purely for this reason. Based on this, I would expect the Panasonic lens to be a slightly stronger performer.

As a general rule, I find that while both Olympus and Panasonic are technically interchangeable, what Robin points out is correct. The mFT cameras write lens characteristics into the metadata so that both the jpegs AND the raw files are impacted by the lens correction data. I would tend to recommend using Olympus lenses on Olympus bodies and Panasonic lenses on Panasonic bodies for that reason.

[rpcrowe]

The excellent images so far posted are of ducks and birds that are still. There is really no focus challenge in shooting birds that are not in flight. It is the BIF birds that demand the fast and accurate auto focus. However, as a mentor once mentioned and which has been repeated on CiC. If you stick to what your equipment can capture decently, you will get very decent images...

[pinakibaidya]

On which camera body? Olympus goes purely for in body stabilization, so either lens will work on the body, but the Olympus lenses do not have in-lens stabilization. Panasonic tends to go for in lens stabilization and some of their more recent bodies do both (even at the same time). If you go for a Panny body, Panasonic lenses are a better option. From what I can see on the Panasonic website, there are no plans to upgrade the in-lens firmware 100 - 300mm lens so that it can use both in lens and in body stabilization at the same time.

From a pure lens performance standpoint, lenses that have a lower zoom ratio tend to be stronger performers from an optical standpoint as the lens designer has fewer constraints to worry about. If you look at "pro" lenses, they rarely exceed a 3x zoom capability, purely for this reason. Based on this, I would expect the Panasonic lens to be a slightly stronger performer.

As a general rule, I find that while both Olympus and Panasonic are technically interchangeable, what Robin points out is correct. The mFT cameras write lens characteristics into the metadata so that both the jpegs AND the raw files are impacted by the lens correction data. I would tend to recommend using Olympus lenses on Olympus bodies and Panasonic lenses on Panasonic bodies for that reason.

I am really confused about MFT body. Whatever images i have searched from flickr i was impressed by the image quality of Olympus OMD series. They say OMD EM1 is slightly better over EM5 regarding CAF as it has both Phase detection as well as Contrast Detect autofocus . I don't know what the real world situation would be!!!

[pinakibaidya]

The excellent images so far posted are of ducks and birds that are still. There is really no focus challenge in shooting birds that are not in flight. It is the BIF birds that demand the fast and accurate auto focus. However, as a mentor once mentioned and which has been repeated on CiC. If you stick to what your equipment can capture decently, you will get very decent images...

You are right Richard. I might repent after buying a different system. I wanted to buy Nikon 1 series but it is also not without limitations . Images are noisy. May be i will buy a 300mm f4 afs + 1.4 tc combo. Lets see.