Camera manufacturers have been supplying kit zooms with new cameras for many years. They’re versatile lenses and can be used in a wide range of shooting conditions and offer a range of focal lengths in one lens.
In the days of film photography, kit zooms were usually around 35-70mm, sometimes 28-70mm. Still, they were never fast lenses, usually offering aperture values from f3.5 at the wide end to f5.6 at the long end, although there were some exceptions, as we’ll see shortly.
Because their design needed more compromises than prime lenses, some early kit zooms didn’t give great results. Still, as designs improved, so did the image’s quality, and many vintage kit zooms were available from the late seventies onwards that give very nice pictures with good sharpness, colour, contrast and background blur. And they’re cheap too!
Camera makers still offer kit zooms today, covering similar ranges of focal length and with similar aperture values, and I wondered how they would compare with an older lens. How far have we come in those years, how has the technology advanced, and how will the images from each compare? Would the modern lens benefit from those years of development and give better photos?
To find out, I took my Sony A7, its modern kit lens, the Sony 28-70mm f3.5-f5.6, and one of my favourite vintage kit zooms, the Olympus OM Zuiko 35-70mm, with a constant f4 aperture (it stays at f4 throughout its range of focal lengths) out on a shoot. I kept the camera settings identical and took identical shots with each lens.
The results were surprising, not in terms of technical elements like sharpness, colour or contrast, but because these lenses, with about forty years between them, gave images with a very different overall character and identity. These lenses have entirely different looks.
It’s a little like comparing a modern Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi movie, shot in 8K, with lots of CGI, with a movie shot in 35mm – the looks are that different, and they demonstrate the differences between the old and the new.
Let’s look at some images in detail and see precisely what these lenses are doing and what kind of image they’re turning out. Surprisingly, both lenses are equal in sharpness, resolving more or less the same level of detail. I should point out that the Sony lens has autofocus so that I could focus with pinpoint accuracy at the target. In contrast, the Olympus lens is manual focus only, so there’s room for a little human error and it may be that on one or two shots, I’ve missed the perfect focus point, but that said, these lenses do seem to possess pretty much equal sharpness.
And that seems to hold right across the range of focal lengths. The lenses are equally sharp at the wide end, in the middle and at the long end, neither lens giving away anything in terms of ability to resolve detail, and it seems that those long years of development have not yielded very much difference, if any at all, at least for these two lenses.
This speaks very well of the original design and quality of the Olympus lens, especially considering that being a constant aperture lens, at the long end, it shoots at f4 whereas the Sony lens closes down to f5.6, so technically, at least the Sony lens ought to give sharper images. The reverse is true at the wide end of the course, where the Olympus lens shoots at f4 compared to the Sony’s f3.5, so the Olympus has the advantage here.
As we might expect, each lens’s contrast performance is a little different. Not very different, though. Vintage lenses are known for being rather less contrasty than their modern counterparts. The composition of glass and coatings has changed over the years and modern lenses are known for being much more contrasty than their vintage counterparts, which shows in this test.
The Olympus lens is the less contrasty of the two here, and the older lens does show its age. The difference is not significant and both lenses give good, contrasty images. Still, the photos from the Sony lens clearly possess more contrast and have deeper blacks and more brilliant whites than those from the older lens. It’s a win for the Sony lens, but not very much!
Each of these lenses has a very different colour signature, and perhaps in this area, the elements that give these lenses such different looks begin to reveal themselves. The modern lens provides a colour palette that strongly emphasises greens and browns; it’s warmer and more vibrant, colours are stronger and saturation is higher and more intense. It’s a nice look, and I like its richness and strength.
The look from the older Olympus lens is nicer, at least to my eye. These things are subjective, of course, but it gives a more delicate, less saturated look; it’s a little cooler and – a nice aspect of this lens – it gives blues in the shadowed areas of the shot. It’s difficult to explain why, but this gives images a unique quality I appreciate whenever I see them. It’s reminiscent of film photography and the types of images it used to make, and I found it quite fascinating to see it emerge here. It adds a little mystery and beauty; I prefer the older lens’s colour.
All those years of development show in the amount of chromatic aberration they display, with the Olympus lens demonstrating far more than the newer Sony lens, which, to its great credit, shows, as far as I can tell, no chromatic aberration at all.
Most vintage lenses display some chromatic aberration, even some of the more expensive ones, and the fact that a relatively cheap modern kit zoom shows none demonstrates very clearly how the use of computers in lens design has ironed out this technical flaw. Personally, though, I don’t mind a little chromatic aberration. Vintage lenses are prized precisely because of their weaknesses, and I don’t see chromatic aberration as an exception. It’s one of the elements that help to define a look and a little, I find, can be pretty engaging, and it certainly helps to give a vintage look.
Let’s consider the quality and nature of the background blur from these two lenses. The modern optic is at a slight disadvantage because, at the long end (longer focal lengths generate more background blur), it’s one-stop slower at f5.6 compared to the constant f4 of the Olympus lens. This is, however, only a slight disadvantage – there’s plenty of ability to make lots of background blur with a zoom lens at the long end, 70mm, and of course, the closer we are to the subject, the more blur we can generate.
The blur these lenses make is very different, though, not only in the amount we see (the Sony lens is slightly slower), but there’s also an astonishing difference in the nature and quality of that blur. The older Olympus lens is the clear winner here, by some considerable margin, creating a background blur that is, at its nicest, simply magical. Really. It’s just beautiful. There are plenty of beautiful bubbles from point light sources and the overall feel of the blur is soft and lovely. Combined with this lens’s colour and fantastic sharpness, it gives a beautiful look.
Blur from the Sony lens is very different. It’s there for sure. The background is blurred, but it’s simply not as nice. It’s rather harsher, less refined, less soft and, in the end, less beautiful. It just can’t seem to see those lovely bubbles from point light sources in the same way the Olympus lens can. Everything is nice and sharp, and every detail is recorded, but the magic isn’t there. As far as background blur goes, the Sony is less likeable – at least to my eye, and this does demonstrate how technical progress can sometimes actually result in less likeable images.
The results of this test were a surprise to me in several ways. I didn’t realise the much older Olympus lens could equal the modern Sony lens in sharpness or that the two lenses differed so much in the colours, contrast and blur they give. I had no idea the Olympus lens gave so much chromatic aberration, either!
Vintage lenses such as this Olympus Zoom were designed before the advent of computers, and the calculations required to produce each optical element of the lens were done by conventional paper-based mathematics.
Inevitably, flaws resulted and those tiny flaws are responsible for the looks and types of images that vintage lenses produce and for their very collectable nature now. Undoubtedly, it augments the face of our old Olympus Zoom, which has performed very nicely indeed, at least to my eye, in this test.
So the question is – is progress always progress? If we prefer the look from the vintage lens, have the forty years between the Olympus zoom and the modern Sony lens, all the refinements in optical calculation, glass and coatings, resulted in something better?
Of course, a lot of subjectivity is involved here, and the lenses and images you prefer are a personal choice. What’s very clear, though, is that these lenses, from very different eras in photography, record the world around them in very different ways.
Many kit zoom lenses are available from the film era, some of which don’t produce adorable images, but many of which can create very nice photos. Yes, they’re usually a little slow and are most commonly found with apertures of f3.5 at the wide end and f5.6 at the long end – just like our modern Sony lens, so nothing much has changed there! Shooting on film can be a limiting factor, but we can shoot digitally in low light by increasing the ISO value on our camera, so lens speed is far less critical than when these lenses were new.
The good news is that these lenses are available cheaply, so whichever you prefer, there’s no significant cost involved. And there aren’t many cheaper ways of getting the vintage look than with a vintage Zoom!
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