my initial thought was thankfully Oly is not Sony with a 6 month release schedule........ m4/3 lens catalogue is pretty darn extensive as is and it seems all the is going to happen is some niche filling.
Haha I totally agree with youmy initial thought was thankfully Oly is not Sony with a 6 month release schedule........ m4/3 lens catalogue is pretty darn extensive as is and it seems all the is going to happen is some niche filling.
i'd love a 200mm F1.8 but not the price i'd have to pay for it
as we are 12 months out from the 2020 olympics OLY needs to pull the finger out on the 150-400 .... hoping we hear more info on release dates at least.
I cannot even think about how much a 200f1.8 might cost 
Sigma does make some pretty sweet macros. Always wished I had a reason to buy the 150mm Macro.
Cost and size and weight and handling. Fuji's 80mm/f2.8 Macro is double the cost and 4x (!!!) the weight of the Oly 60mm/f2.8 with the same field of view and magnification!
I have no idea.
The implicit assumption made here, that the lens would not be used for autofocus bracketing and subsequent focus stacking, probably doesn't hold. For a lens obtaining magnification by extension, as is normally the case for macros, the effective aperture at 1x magnification (1:1) is two stops slower than the nominal (marked) aperture. So the maximum effective aperture of an f/2.8 macro at 1x is 5.6. For an f/4 it's f/8 and therefore entering the diffraction limited range for both 16 and 20 MP m43 sensors under the Rayleigh criterion. For future, higher pixel count sensors, f/2.8 nominal won't be fast enough to avoid diffraction onset at 1x (it's arguably already not fast enough for 20 MP). Additionally, up to the fps limit of the body and SD card, speed of bracket acquisition is gated by the shutter speed.
Fair and valid points. My assumption was that most of the people who wanted a longer macro lens wanted it for the purposes of greater working distance to make shooting skittish critters easier, which is a workflow that doesn't really work with a tripod (at least not for me, anyway). Assuming, of course, that the insects are alive and in the wild (not freshly removed from a freezer or gassed).
It's a limiting factor with plants, too, as short working distances constrain camera and tripod placements such that it's not always possible to obtain focus or a worthwhile composition. I'm an infrequent and usually incidental insect photographer and therefore use both a nodal slide and wormdrive rail to add "working distance" from the ballhead, which is usually sufficient for the Panasonic-Leica 45 and other lenses I use with working distances down to 10 mm. There are times, though, where I'd need the 90° or rotating column tripod I don't have to get the camera into a compositionally attractive position.
In general it seems to work more or less fine, albeit with some degradation in image quality which may or may not be worse than stopping down depending on the requirements. I'm unsure of the extent to which newer bodies are able to manage photographer wobbles along the image axis by varying focus but my experience with 4k post focus on the G7 (no IBIS or focus bracketing outside of 4k modes) and PL 45 (Mega OIS) is older Panasonic OIS alone isn't sufficient for the handheld macro I do. It'd probably perform better for photographers less prone to photographing little tiny plants and therefore more likely to be more stable body positions. My experiences suggest five axis IBIS would definitely be valuable for the xy and roll stabilization, which is consistent with the experiences of the E-M1 II, G85, and G9 users I'm aware of who do handheld or semi-handheld focus bracketing. No data for other Olympus or Panasonic bodies.
