The Sharpness test of the Teleconverters

(Full frame of the sample images that follow)

What I wanted to show was in real world images and how the lenses perform in the real world. Basically I took the 50-200mm SWD, 70-300mm, 150mm and the 90-250mm out this afternoon. The scene though boring does work well for this test. The sample is taken from near the middle and I cropped out a 600x500 pixel section from each frame. On the left, you can select from the drop down list to see a comparison between the standard frame, and the final image. I have broken the test into 5 charts - 50-100mm, 101-150mm, 1550-250mm, 251-350, and 350mm+ range. (All focal lengths are in 4/3 format) all samples are straight from Aperture, no sharpening or any frame adjustment was made. All in all the most sloppy lens and teleconverter combo was the 50-200mm and the 2.0 teleconverter. Quite a bit of play was in the setup. Each shot is shown wide open, with no stopping down at all, which could help in some situations. But really the overall performance is quite good from all the setups. Finally as for lens hunting, the 70-300mm did the worst, but all were able to find focus after a couple tries using the E-3. All images were shot with from a tripod, with a remote release. Really no lens performed bad in the test.

Each lens when stopped down has a greater Depth of Field, but it becomes more difficult to gain enough shutter speeds to effectively capture your subject without lens and/or subject movement.

Final note - You will see on the right a sample image on the left you can select from the list to see the differences between the sample image and the other image.The first set of numbers is the lens e.g. 50-200mm lens, second is if a teleconverter is present - e.g. w/1.4 or w/ 2.0 and finally the focal length of the lens e.g. 50mm -600mm .

The lenses Used in the test -

50-200mm - 150mm - 70-300mm - 90-250mm

Lens speed's with teleconverters attached

Of all the lenses in terms of speed the 70-300mm bothers me the most. At f11 it is very slow, and I assumed that the camera could not focus at all, however, it was after a couple of tries able to focus.

The 2 Teleconverters

With all the images you may have to be patient for the pages to load. But for this test I assumed that quality was worth it over speed.