Olympus Zuiko Auto-T 180mm f/2

A 180mm at f/2 was an unusually fast combination for the early 1980s, the kind of spec that sounds like a typo until you see the front element, which is the size of a coffee saucer. Olympus built it alongside the 250mm f/2 and 350mm f/2.8 to give OM-system pros a fast super-telephoto lineup they could actually compete with against Canon and Nikon, both of whom already had faster, longer glass at the top end (Nikon's 300mm f/2 ED was the headline monster of the period). What Olympus brought was reach and speed in one body that did not weigh as much as the comparable setups from the giants, and extra-low-dispersion glass in the formula to keep a lens this fast from falling apart.

Wide open at f/2 it is genuinely sharp, which is rare for any super-fast tele. There is a faint veiling glow on high-contrast edges at full bore, gone by f/2.8 and clinical by f/4. The reason it holds together is that ED glass in the formula, which keeps chromatic aberration in check on a lens this fast. It is not an apochromatic design, so a little green-and-magenta longitudinal fringing does show up on out-of-focus highlights wide open, but it stays modest for the era. The out-of-focus rendering is the real reason to own one. Wide open, backgrounds melt completely and the subject sits in front of them with a separation a 135 f/2.8 cannot approach. Stop down even slightly and the highlight discs start to show some cat's-eye shaping toward the edges, the usual sawtooth you get once a fast lens narrows its iris, so the dreamiest rendering really lives at f/2 itself.

On paper it was aimed at available-light work, indoor sport and theater and stage, the situations where an OM shooter needed reach and was stuck on slow slide film. It is also a serious portrait lens. The compression at 180mm plus the shallow focus plane flatters faces and lifts them clean off the backdrop. Whether many photographers actually used it that way is another question, because clean copies were never common and never cheap.

The honest weaknesses are mundane: bulk and filters. This is not a lens you carry on spec. The 100mm filter thread means any ND or polarizer is expensive and hard to find, and the sheer size makes it conspicuous, which rules it out for quiet candid work. There is also the physics. At 180mm and f/2, depth of field at portrait distance is a sliver, so your focus has to land or the frame is gone.

Today it is a collector grail. Asking prices run from the low thousands up toward ten thousand for a clean one, well past a modern autofocus 70-200, because relatively few were made and OM holdouts hunt them. People still buy it because nothing in the OM mount matches its speed at this focal length, and because the ED rendering earns the money. Cross-shoppers eye the Canon FD 200mm f/1.8 or the Nikon 180mm f/2.8 ED, but those are other systems entirely.

When you shoot it wide open in a dim hall, meter for the shadows you actually care about and let the highlights fall where they fall, then dial that reading into Zone Light Meter so the f/2 is doing the work you paid for. Underexpose a lens like this and the speed you bought is wasted.