New Olympus 150-400 f4.5 w/1.25 TC Built In

New lens announced by Olympus:

https://www.dpreview.com/articles/7452340372/cp-2019-olympus-shows-super-tele-zoom-and-2-0-tc-under-glass

Joe

There seems to be some confusion regarding the capability of lenses used with different sensor sizes.  My understanding is that the light gathering capability of these lenses is the same regarding sensor size but the focal length and the depth of field is directly affected by the sensor size (directly proportionally for focal length and indirectly for DOF).  Is that correct?  If so isn't the "equivalent aperture" of this lens BOTH f4.5 and f9, the "equivalent focal range" 300-800, and the "equivalent TC" 1.5?

There is indeed a lot of confusion. The summary is:

The focal length gives the same field of view as 300-800 on a full frame, it's just like cropping the centre out of a full frame image.

The DOF wide open is equivalent to f9 on full frame for the same image framing.

It provides the same light per unit area. the front element is the same size but internal optics are such that it only illuminates and corrects the image for a m43 sensor, about 22mm diameter, where a full frame lens would need to illuminate a 43mm diameter image circle.

If it managed to illuminate a full frame sensor it would gather more light in total, so that any given image would be of higher quality. Same light per unit area but more light in total.

You could for example take advantage of that by opening up your aperture compared to what you would choose for a full frame image by 2 stops and use 2 stops lower ISO to get the same shutter speed. At low ISO the images are going to be quite close in the quality of the final image, but as ISO rises the smaller light gathering area starts to bite harder and full frame image quality leaps ahead.