We live in the 21st Century, an era of high-tech autofocus zooms, and Olympus comes up with a fixed focal length lens that’s as retro as a bakelite radio. What’s going on?

Don’t knock fixed focal length lenses. Zooms may have taken over the world, but so has reality TV and Big Macs. Popularity doesn’t necessarily equate to quality.Zooms may appear to make life simpler, but that doesn’t mean they improve your photography or that they’re nicer to use. Yes, a fixed focal length lens is less flexible, but only in terms of composition.

This 25mm ‘pancake’ lens is so slim, it makes your Olympus DSLR not much larger than a prosumer compact. And its f2.8 maximum aperture is half a stop faster than the average zoom, even at its minimum focal length.

It’s surprisingly how quickly you get used to using a fixed focal length lens. This may surprise a generation of photographers raised on zooms, but not those whose memories stretch back to the 1980s, the last great heyday of photography. Back in those days, cameras came with a 50mm ‘standard’ lens, not a zoom. The Olympus 25mm, thanks to the 2x focal factor of the Four Thirds system, reproduces that classic focal length exactly.

But here’s the first issue. A standard lens of that time typically had a maximum aperture of f1.7, and the better ones were f1.4, so this tiny Olympus is one to two stops slower. Having said that, f2.8 is typical for pancake lenses. Indeed, this lens closely resembles a Pentax 40mm f2.8, which was once (sigh) part of your reviewer’s collection.

Olympus hasn’t quite recaptured the feel of classic prime lenses, though. There is a manual focusing ring but no distance scale, so old zone focusing and depth of field techniques aren’t going to work here. There’s no aperture ring either, which is one of the greatest losses of all in modern lenses.

It’s still nice to use, though. The lack of a zoom is oddly liberating because it makes photography a much more instinctive thing. If your subject doesn’t fill the frame you have to get closer. If it doesn’t fit, you have to move further away. It sounds cockeyed, but this primitive picture-taking approach is actually rather refreshing. It means that you pay more attention to the subject and less to the camera, which is exactly how it should be. If you haven’t shot in this way before, it will change the way you think about your photography.

Optically, the 25mm is good. It’s a very simple design with only five elements in four groups, and that’s because when you take away the need to zoom in and out, the optical parameters become far simpler. And yet there is some chromatic aberration towards the edges of the frame, which is slightly disappointing.

The resolution figures are very good, though. Not surprisingly, it’s a little soft at maximum aperture, though it’s still resolving 1200 line widths/picture height, so properly focused images will look crisp. Between f4 and f8 this piece of glass is at its best, and the definition is limited as much by the camera sensor as the lens itself. Beyond f8 the definition starts to fall again, but this is inevitable with smaller sensor sizes as diffraction effects take hold.

Overall, this is a nice little lens which offers a very different and more traditional way to take pictures. We’d highly recommend you at least try shooting in this way once. The lack of a distance scale is perhaps its biggest weakness, but it’s very nicely made and rather good value for a modern prime lens, too.

Final Verdict Olympus’s 25mm pancake lens doesn’t completely reproduce the feel of a classic prime lens, but it comes close. It’s tiny, well made and the simplicity of a single focal length and a single maximum aperture is refreshing. Also, compared to other modern prime lenses, it’s actually not that pricey 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.