Olympus Has Officially Pulled the Plug on Its Four Thirds Lenses

table1349 · Mar 12, 2017

Gary A. · Mar 12, 2017

I am a bit surprised it took this long. RIP FT lenses.

Derrel · Mar 12, 2017

Well, with no new cameras in six years in that lens mount, it seems like it was a smart decision on the part of Olympus. dPreview has a short article on this as well, at In memoriam: Olympus brings down the curtain on the legacy Four Thirds system

As I understand it, the high-end lenses in this system were extraordinary performers, and I mean extraordinarily GOOD optics. As the dPReview piece mentions, Olympus went with telecentric lens designs, meaning lens designs where the light rays coming out of the rear of the lens were designed to strike the sensor at as straight an angle as was possible, which helped a lot back in the days before microlenses atop the sensor had been refined to the level of efficiency and perfection they are now at.

On wide-angle lenses designed for film use, the light rays at the center of the sensor strike head-on; as one moves away from the center of the lens's projected image circle, the rays at the edges of the sensor hit at quite a glancing angle, and that glancing angle means the light does not hit and does not fill up the pixel wells with nearly as much efficiency as in the center of the image, leading to image darkening, and just substandard performance, as compared to the center of the sensor. With film, the light-sensitive particles are suspended in an emulsion in a random but even way;pixels can be thought of as honeycombs, or as tiny buckets: direct incidence fills the bucket easily and fully, while glancing light rays "miss the bucket a little bit", so to speak. Hence, the telecentric lens design priority Oly adopted.

Olympus made a big deal about the 4/3 system lenses, and one review I read from the late Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape had high,high praise for the luxury Olympus lenses. A man who had the ljuxury of owning and of testing some of the world's best lenses called them...some of the finest lenses he'd ever used.

Look at the 90-250mm f/2.8....wow! What an ambitious zoom design.They also had a very fast 135 as I recall. The real issue was...the cameras...and Oly's third-tier position in a camera market dominated back then by Canon and Nikon, and new format that was really probably too small for the sensor technology of its era.