Olympus PEN PL5 lets talk about lenses!

[Village Idiot]

And you can set AF+MF so that the camera will auto focus until you move the focusing ring on the lens and then it will manually focus. With this, you can change a setting to that the camera zooms in on the focus point when manually focusing for a very useful tool that will allow you to accurately dial in the focus more so than if you were viewing a non zoomed in image.

Unfortunately, I don't think you can separate the focus from the shutter function like on the OM-D, so you may either be able to AF or MF and not have the AF+MF option. However, this is easy enough to change. If you want to go cheap, you can purchase an adapter and legacy lenses from older OM mounts, Pentax mounts, Minolta mounta, Nikon mounts, Canon mounts, and others. They will only manually focus on your camera, but it gives you a way to purchase some decent cheap lenses. I have a 5 f/1.8 OM lens an adapter. I'd like to find a longer OM prime that I can use for street photography.

 

[CloverMom]

Thank you both. I thought it had something to do with focus but since it wasn't doing anything I figured either I was wrong or it was broke lol. To be honest, when I tried it, I'm not sure what mode the camera was in. I'll go through all the modes and see what happens. My son who is 13 now wants my camera haha! He goes to high school this fall so I told him if he takes a photography class I may let him have it and I'll get the OMD M5. Idk, he's much more tech smart than I am so I may stick with the pl5 and get him the omd lol. Anyway, now that I have the camera in my hands, I may be asking alot more questions. Thank you for your helpful tips and your kind responses

 

[Ron Evers]

You have from 14mm to 150mm covered with your two zooms. Try shooting every day for a month with these two lenses & then go back over your shots & record the focal length each was shot at. You will likely see a trend to a particular focal length with each lens & this is the area to consider for a faster prime lens.

Every body shoots a bit different, some folk prefer wide angle & others telephoto lenses; myself I lean towards the longer focal lengths & prefer my Oly 45/1.8 in most cases to the wider Sigma 19/2.8. Both are very sharp lenses. I note nobody has mentioned the two native M4/3 Sigma lenses. For that reason I will post an example from the Sigma 19/2.8:




Now this is a heavy crop from the above image



Not too shabby for a lens you can get for about $200.