The lens by itself is fantastic -- easily five stars. If you shoot M43 at extreme variable zoom, you don't even have another option worthy of mentioning besides this marvel. But the product I'm rating here is a bundle, and they bundled it with a bunch of cheap garbage. The so-called "UV-filter" that comes with this package ruins the bokeh, causing some weird diffraction pattern to appear all over the out of focus areas. Unfortunately I lost a full day's outing and half a day of troubleshooting until I figured out that it was all the UV filter's fault. I can't in good conscience ignore these faulty accessories and review the lens alone, because the accessories have positively harmed me so. Whoever bundled them clearly didn't bother to look for quality accessories, ... MoreThe lens by itself is fantastic -- easily five stars. If you shoot M43 at extreme variable zoom, you don't even have another option worthy of mentioning besides this marvel. But the product I'm rating here is a bundle, and they bundled it with a bunch of cheap garbage. The so-called "UV-filter" that comes with this package ruins the bokeh, causing some weird diffraction pattern to appear all over the out of focus areas. Unfortunately I lost a full day's outing and half a day of troubleshooting until I figured out that it was all the UV filter's fault. I can't in good conscience ignore these faulty accessories and review the lens alone, because the accessories have positively harmed me so. Whoever bundled them clearly didn't bother to look for quality accessories, and didn't do any testing whatsoever. The macro filters are a sick joke. Those can't work with this kind of lens. The image quality goes down so low that there's no point using them. Even the lens cover keeps falling off! I'm seriously afraid to try the cloth. Will it scratch the lens?? You can get an excellent lens for a decent price here. Just make sure all the accessories go down the garbage immediately, before you waste all this time testing them because you can't believe how bad they are, like I did. Get yourself a quality set of filters from a place that knows what they're doing.

I've read the this lens is soft at its extremes. I think, in fact, this is true, but "soft" is relative. It produces useable images that satisfy my needs perfectly. If you're a pixel peeper and aren't happy with anything less that what a $2000 lens would produce, you might not like it. I don't have that need. The lens I received was in excellent condition. The included photo is of a radio tower that's a little over a mile away. I shot this hand-held at the 300mm setting.

I finally got a pretty good deal on the Lumix 100-300mm lens for my MFT Panasonic G85. M next lenses down are 14-150mm, 30mm and 10mm. This long lens will allow me to shoot the wildlife and landscapes I like.The lens was smaller and lighter than I expected. It may not even be necessary to use the Power Optical Image Stabilization, especially since my camera body will stabilize as well. At f4-5.6 it's not the fastest lens but plenty fast for my needs.I am particularly fond of the lens being able to focus down to about 5 feet. This allows me to shoot subjects close up with actually getting in their face.