Panasonic Lumix 7-14mm f4 quality at 14mm

All lens corrections were disabled, so there's no additional software compensation for vignetting, geometric distortion or chromatic aberrations. Normally this would allow us to evaluate the uncorrected optical performance of the lens alone, but with Micro Four Thirds lenses there are additional corrections stored as profiles within the firmware; these are automatically applied to JPEGs in-camera, and also by most RAW converters including ACR when opening the RAW file. You can't turn them off.

As such it's often hard to see exactly what's going on behind the scenes of Micro Four Thirds lenses without using an obscure RAW converter which ignores the profiles, so instead of trying to chase the pure optical performance of the lens for the sake of it, I thought it would be much more useful to simply show how it will perform in normal use. That said, as a Panasonic lens on a Panasonic body, I believe both the geometric distortion and chromatic aberrations are being automatically corrected by the RAW processor here, with only vignetting being left untouched.

Moving onto the crops below, much of the stretching in the corners due to distortion and subsequent correction has disappeared at the milder focal length of 14mm, although I'd say while the degree of detail is still very good, it's not quite as crisp as my 10mm and 7mm results. One thing remains constant though and that's the vignetting which darkens the corners at f4, but is greatly reduced by closing the aperture to f5.6, or simply applying correction either automatically for in-camera JPEGs or using your RAW converter.

No complaints as you move towards the center though where the degree of detail remains very sharp and well-defined at f4 and f5.6. As with the other focal lengths though, beware of shooting at smaller apertures as a veil of softness due to diffraction begins to descend at f8 and becomes quite noticeable by f11.

So I'd again recommend shooting between f4 and f5.6 and avoid using anything smaller unless you're chasing a starburst effect on lights or the Sun, or simply have too much light even at your maximum shutter speed and minimum ISO.

So while the corner performance peaked mid-way through the focal range, the 7-14mm still delivers great quality across the frame at 14mm, and as you move into the center of the image, the quality remains superb.

But how does this compare to other lenses? Find out in my Panasonic 7-14mm vs Olympus 12mm or Panasonic 7-14mm vs 14-42mm pages. Alternatively if you've seen enough you may wish to check out my Panasonic 7-14mm sample images or skip straight to my verdict.