Olympus Zuiko Digital 7-14mm f/4.0 Zoom

This is an awesome lens!

There is no pincushion or barrel distortion, nor vingetting at any zoom setting. I sometimes use it for art photography, and the edges of a framed piece of art line up perfectly with the image edges.

It demands a different way of shooting. In the shot I submitted, I was inches away from the mud balls at the bottom.

A super-wide might not come to mind for people photography -- you have to stick it right in people's faces sometimes! But that creates such a feeling of intimacy with the subject that you can't get standing way back with your telephoto. When you view the photos, you realize that the photographer (and thus the viewer) is an off-camera subject of the photo.

I love using this lens for "grab" shots. Who needs a steekeen twist/rotate LCD! I just hold the camera over my head or at my feet, estimate the angle of view, and snap away. You always get something interesting!

The key to effective use of this lens is to get close. Anything more than a few feet away is background! But you have amazing depth-of-field, even when wide open.

This is the lens that lives on my E-300. In fact, it is the reason I bought the E-300!

Simply incredible quality -- both optically, and build quality. Water-resistant design. No other lens like it on the market.

Big, heavy, expensive. I'm a prime shooter, and I use this lens 90% of the time at 7mm, 10% at 14mm, and almost never in-between. I would have rather had a 7mm prime that was lighter, faster, and cheaper.

I once had a no-name 24-48 zoom in Olympus OM mount, and regularly shoot OM Zuiko 18mm/f3.5 and 20mm/f2 lenses.

What seems at first to be a fairly steep entry price gets you access to a truly unique lens, giving you the ability to create certain types of images that simply cannot be created by another other than those who choose to pay the even steeper entry price for full frame digital SLR's. When looked at in this light, the price of this lens doesn't seen so bad and is worth the price for the performance!

An extremely well made lens and a joy to operate the controls. Zoom control is silky smooth. Quite massive when compared to the mid-line of lenses, such as the 14-54 f2.8-3.5 or even the 50-200 f2.8-3.5. Distortion correction is awesome and sharpness is excellent at all focal lengths. The edges at 7mm don't show any bowed/bent lines and little to no shading in the corners wide open at f4- it's really hard to convey in words how good the optical quality of this lens is. Normally a lens such as a 7mm (14mm equivalent in 35mm photography) is quite specialized and you have to go looking for subjects to take advantage of the focal length. Being able to zoom continuously from 7-14mm makes it a much more useful lens for varied subjects. The massive lens cap fits very snugly and doesn't come off easily, a nice change compared to many other super-wide lenses of this type with slip-on caps.

I'm going to list a couple of perceived weaknesses here because some would consider them so, but not necessarily me. You cannot mount filters on this lens at all- something I do not miss. This lens is quite massive- again, something that I do not have a problem with because Olympus simply did not cut any corners with this product. This is a pro quality lens designed to be used by someone who appreciates what this lens brings to the party. The up front expense is quite high, but compared to what one has to do to get a rectlinear 14mm lens in any other mount, namely the 14mm f2.8L Canon EF (you'll need to spend $3,000 on a 5D or $7,900 on a 1Ds to get the 14mm field of view, and then the lens is almost $2,000!) this is actually quite a good deal.

The only lens close to this in terms of super-wide performance was the 17-40 f4L, and that was only on the Canon Elan 7 film DSLR. Once I sold that and bought a 10D it became quite ordinary in terms of wide angle coverage.

No experience here, so I'll not comment.