A cheap-looking lens from one of the great camera makers of the time. The lens is shown attached to the Fotodiox Pro EXCELL +1 0.72x Focal Reducer
Page Last Edited : Saturday, 14th of June 2025.
© Dave Rowlands. All Rights Reserved
I bid on this out of curiosity, as I already have the Tamron 35-70mm f3.5 (17A) version. The starting bid was quite low, but I actually won the bidding, and it went for £13.99, including P&P, so I was quite pleased.
I always check the forums before actually bidding on any lens, and the general feeling was that optically, it was great, but its construction made it look cheap. They weren't wrong there, as it looks cheaply made and feels plasticky, not something you would expect from Canon. I've included a couple of shots with it mounted on my OM-D E-M1 II and in a rare appearance without the HLD-9 Battery Power Grip.
The lens looks good on the camera, the large focusing ring is easy to use and rotates the front so the use of a CPL filter practically useless, but the heavy ridging looks cheap, the zoom ring just below it has the same kind of ridging, and when zooming, it doesn't shrink or extend the lens length. Annoyingly, it moves the elements internally. If you have a clip-on lens cap, it will fall off when zooming from 70mm to 35mm, and to reattach it, the lens must be zoomed to 70mm.
You can of course, add the cap to the lens body itself, but then when you zoom to 70mm it gets pushed off.
Those heavy ridges in my opinion makes it look really cheap and the plastic looks really dull after a short while.
Without the HLD-9 Battery Power Grip the lens looks prety good on the camera.
I took a few shots around the garden, and as usual, the weather was dull and contrastless; some are shown below.
1/100th, f6.3, ISO 200. I was doing some tests on my newly aquired Weston Master v1 exposure meter that came with the invercone and ND filter.
It turns out that the meter is quite accurate and I'll be keeping it.
On the M43 system it has a FOV (Field Of View) as a 70mm lens so it's actually getting the best part of the lens anyway.
I have always liked the way Olympus renders the out of camera JPegs, this was using the "Standard" picture mode. As usual the weather wasn't at it's sunny best.
When the Fotodiox Pro FD-43 EXCELL +1 added it certainly looks like a lens worth taking a closer look at.
Here are some quickie shots taken in the garden while dodging the rain.
