This 12-60mm standard zoom was launched alongside the professional Olympus E-3 DSLR. It’s designed to be a cut above the 14-42mm kit lens sold with the E-420 and E-520 cameras, as befits the E-3’s professional status.

Bought on its own the 12-60mm lens looks expensive but, as ever with ‘kit’ lenses, there are huge savings to be made by buying the camera and the lens at the same time.

While the cheaper Olympus kit zoom has a 3x zoom range equivalent to 28-84mm, the 12-60mm is a 5x zoom, covering a focal range equivalent to 24-120mm. It’s also significantly faster, with an f2.8 maximum aperture at 12mm and f4 at 120mm. This means it’s half a stop faster at the wide-angle end and a full stop faster at its longest focal length.

Not surprisingly, it’s bigger and heavier. It’s well made, though, and features a metal mount, as you’d expect from a pro lens. The zoom action is nicely weighted, with just the right amount of stiffness to prevent zoom creep but not enough to make it tiresome. In front of that is the focusing ring – this lens offers full-time manual focusing so that you don’t have to switch to manual first. There’s a distance scale under a transparent window.

Olympus claims this lens, in combination with the E-3 body, has the world’s fastest AF. This is achieved with Olympus’s SWD (Supersonic Wave Drive) AF motors. It’s certainly quiet, matching Nikon’s Silent Wave and Canon’s USM lenses for refinement, and the AF speed barely changes even at the longest focal lengths, which is where most lenses start to slow down.

It’s the test results which reveal this lens’s most striking characteristics, though. First of all, it’s very sharp at maximum aperture, even towards the edges of the frame. It maintains this sharpness right down to f11, where diffraction effects start to creep in. You wouldn’t really want to use this lens at f16 if you could avoid it, and certainly not f22. However, this applies to all digital lenses.

The second striking characteristic is the consistency. Most lenses show a loss of sharpness at longer focal lengths, but this one doesn’t. The test chart shows that there’s almost no difference at all in the resolution at different focal lengths.

The distortion levels are low, and at minimum focal length the 12-60mm shows less barrel distortion than most kit lenses, despite being that little bit ‘wider’. At longer focal lengths the levels of pincushion distortion are low, too. There’s almost no chromatic aberration either – though this may partly be due to the sophistication of the four thirds system – and the optics and the camera firmware work together. It’s worth mentioning, too, that the cheaper 14-42mm kit lens, which we tested alongside this one, shows similarly high levels of resolution, consistency and aberration control.

When you buy a pro camera like the E-3, you’ll want a pro lens to go with it. The Olympus 12-60mm certainly fits the bill. It’s an excellent lens that really does justice to an excellent camera.

Final Verdict Pro cameras demand pro lenses. It’s not just about resolution, but consistency and control of aberrations too, and the 12-60mm Olympus, the natural ‘kit’ lens for the E-3, offers all of these things. Almost all the lenses we test are compromised to some degree, but not this one. Outstanding OVERALL

Our lens reviewer, and technical expert, Rod is a veritable photographic encyclopaedia. His illustrious CV has seen him write for many mags, websites and journals.