Testing the Rare Olympus 180mm f/2 Super-Tele Lens from the 1980s

I had a chance to test a very rare lens: the Zuiko Auto-T 180mm f/2 ED-IF, an Olympus super-telephoto lens from the early 80s. Back then, the OM-system bodies that Olympus had were OM-3 and OM-4. Olympus had a very nice line up of Zuiko lenses for those cameras and other OM-system bodies. The one lineup they did not have was pro-grade fast telephoto lenses.

Olympus made several fast telephoto lenses. One of them was the 180mm f/2 lens that I had the chance to test. Other lenses were a 100mm f/2, 250mm f/2, and a 350mm f/2.8. This way, Olympus was able to offer fast telephoto lenses to pros. All these lenses are very rare and cost quite a lot of money.

You can still find them on eBay. The prices are from several thousand all the way up to $10,000. That is a lot of money for a lens. Some of them were sold in Japan. That will add up to costs.

As I said on the video that I made about the 180mm f/2 lens, the image quality is stunning. Not much to complain about.

Of course, the lenses are full manual. The lens has an aperture ring and it is manual focus. I tried with two cameras. One of them was my Olympus M-1. The first SLR from Olympus. Unfortunately, the shutter was not very consistent and the images did no come out the way I wanted.

I was able to use it also with the E-M1 Mark III. I had an adapter from Novoflex. With that, it worked very well. The focusing was quite easy, thanks to focus peaking and magnify features that help a lot. I am not very experienced using manual focus for moving subjects so I concentrated on more easy subjects.

Of course, I needed to try it for bird photography. That is the most likely genre that this lens would be used for.

All in all, it was a very exciting experience. Thanks so much, Olympus Finland for lending the lens for this test.

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