broken calsan
Registered: May 2007
Location: Perth, Western Australia
Posts: 1441
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Review Date: Tue, 27 October 2009
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 8
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Positive aspects of the product (pros):
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Optically excellent
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Cons:
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Handling less so
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No other lens covers as many situations. It's reasonably fast, close focusing and goes from wide angle to telephoto whilst staying sharp the most of the way. Best used beyond 24mm. Eye poppingly good at 35-50mm.
Has good contrast and very little chromatic aberration, although some at 17mm. At 17mm it vignettes somewhat and it's not really super sharp at f2.8, but neither are any other zoom lenses. At F8, it's as good as it gets across the whole zoom range.
Downsides are unavoidable: it's fairly big and blocks the built in flash below 28mm. The lens cap is hard to put on if you use the hood. Its zoom direction is 'backwards' to the Pentax direction and you can't manually focus without switching off autofocus on the camera body. A normal thickness circular polariser vignettes at 17mm. It's not weather-sealed. Zooms in two stages, otherwise the construction is good. I've had mine two years and it still doesn't creep or wobble.
Summary: Optically first rate, however, not as nice to use as a Pentax DA zoom. These days, I prefer my 18-55 WR as it is smaller and similar image quality.
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Calum
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