Introduction

Ease of Use

The Panasonic Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 O.I.S. is a fully weather sealed zoom lens with a dedicated L-mount that is made of metal. Communication between lens and camera body is provided through ten electrical contacts. 

The lens is both dust- and moisture-resistant, an excellent feature given that this lens will predominantly be used by wildlife and sports photographers in all kinds of conditions. Note however that in order to take full advantage of the weatherproofing, you will need to mount it on a similarly sealed body, like the Panasonic S5 II camera that we tested it with.

Tipping the scales at 1,285g / 2.83lb without the tripod mount or lens hood fitted and measuring 196.1mm / 7.72inch in length and 92.0mm / 3.62inch in diameter, the 50-200mm F2.8 IS PRO is clearly a substantial lens, but given the 100-500mm effective focal length, that's perhaps no surprise.

The Panasonic Lumix S5 II camera that we used for this test is a good match for the lens, offering good balance, fast auto-focus, and full environmental seals, although we'd also fit the optional battery grip for extended hand-held use.

The Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 O.I.S. lens itself is very well built, fully living up to the price tag that Panasonic have given it.

An inner zoom is not used, which means that the length of the lens barrel changes when zooming in/out. It increases by 8.5cm / 3.35in when zooming out from 100mm to 500mm, making it much more conspicuous and less well-balanced.

In terms of features, the Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 O.I.S. lens certainly has a lot to offer.

It offers built-in image stabilisation, dubbed "Dual I.S. 2", which actually works in conjunction with the IS system in the camera body to offer up to an impressive 7 EV steps of compensation.

The brand new tight-smooth ring that is located between the zoom and focus rings allows you to adjust the feel of the zoom ring for optimal control and prevent unintended zoom movements. We'd have liked to see a bit more delineation between the two settings, as the Smooth setting isn't that light/smooth and the Tight setting isn't overly tight.

There is a focus limiter switch with two different settings - FULL and 5m-infinity.

Underneath that is an AF/MF switch for selecting the focusing method and an O.I.S switch for turning the image stabilisation on to either Mode 1 (normal recording) or Mode 2 (panning) or turning it off.

The Zoom Limit switch on the bottom-right of the lens barrel can be set to Off or On. If set to On, the zoom function is set to a specific range that can be configured in-camera (the default setting is 150-500mm).

Around the base of the lens is a tripod mount that is compatible with Arca-Swiss type clamps and is designed for a comfortable grip when carried. The tripod mount can be attached and removed even when the lens is attached to the camera. It can also be rotated using the knurled locking ring to easily switch between horizontal and vertical shooting orientations without having to move the tripod head.

This lens features an 82mm filter thread which does not rotate on focus, great news for anyone intending to use a polariser or ND grads on the lens.

When used with an optional teleconverter, the longest possible focal range is increased from 500mm up to 700mm with the DMW-STC14 1.4x Teleconverter and up to 1000mm with the DMW-STC20 2x Teleconverter.

This lens utilises the dual phase linear motor from the Lumix S 100mm F2.8 Macro lens and the optical encoder from the LUMIX S 24-60mm F2.8 standard zoom lens to offer fast and silent auto-focusing.

In use, this lens offers virtually silent focusing and we found the AF system to be very quick and precise when pairing the lens with the S5 II camera. With the focus mode on the camera set to AFC and subject detection on, the lens tracked moving subjects very well.

Manual focusing is possible in a focus-by-wire fashion. This should not put you off using it as it feels pretty natural in use, and actually enables the camera to display a magnified view of the subject automatically, i.e. without you having to press a dedicated button or enter the menu. The focus ring is generously sized and more than adequate for the job.

The focus ring is customisable so that it can be assigned to control shooting settings such as aperture when the focus mode is set to AF. The direction of the ring rotation can also be set to either left or right.

This lens offers a single unmarked, customisable Focus button located between the zoom and focus rings to which different functions can be assigned, such as the Hybrid Zoom.

In the box the lens comes with a large lens hood plus the aforementioned tripod mount and front and rear lens caps.

Focal Range

The Panasonic Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1's focal length of 100mm provides an angle of view of 24°.

100mm

The 500mm focal length provides an angle of view of 5°.

500mm

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as blue or purple fringes along contrasty edges, were not especially apparent in our test shots, only appearing in very high contrast areas.

100mm

500mm

Vignetting

With the lens set to its maximum aperture, there is some noticeable light fall-off in the corners, requiring you to stop down by at least 3 f-stops to completely prevent it.

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500mm

Distortion

This lens doesn't exhibit very much pincushion distortion at either end of the zoom range, as you can see in the photos below.

100mm

500mm

Sunstars and Flare

The Panasonic Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 is capable of creating some quite nice sunstars when stopped-down, as shown below, although flare is fairly evident when shooting directly into the sun.

100mm

500mm

Macro

The Panasonic Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 offers a useful minimum focusing distance of 0.8m / 2.62ft at 100mm through to 1.5m / 4.92ft at 500mm, with a maximum magnification of 0.16x at 100mm and .36x magnification at 500mm.

100mm

500mm

100mm

500mm

100mm

500mm

Bokeh

Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc.

In the Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 lens, Panasonic have employed an iris diaphragm with 11 rounded blades, which has resulted in very nice bokeh in our view.

We do realise, however, that bokeh evaluation is subjective, so we've included lots of examples below for your perusal.

Sharpness

In order to show you how sharp the Panasonic Lumix S 100-500mm F5-7.1 lens is, we are providing 100% crops on the following pages.