Got a nice parcel yesterday with the DA 50-135. Have taken just a few dozen shots with it sofar, and the results look promising. Sharpness is good, but I had quite harsh midday lighting so can't say too much yet ...
The feel of the lens is nice, it is heavy for its size, but much less than the Sigma 70-200 2.8 it is replacing of course :-) The build is great, feels very solid, the zoom and focus ring move smoothly without any play (a bit stiff actually). The hood is rather large, a bit too much for my taste and it is plastic (allthougy a bit sturdier than most others). A metal 67mm scre-in hood works too, but the one I have is a bit to short I think ... I tried it without the K10D firmware upgrade first, and it works just fine with the screwdriver AF, but is noisy as usual. Unfortunately I failed to time the AF for later comparison with the SDM :-( After upgrading the firmware, focusing seems about the same, perhaps a notch faster but not like twice as fast or so :-) It is really silent though, you can hear it if you are in a quiet room, but any sounds arround you and you won't notice anymore. Due to the 2.8 opening, you can really see the plane of focus wander through the scenery, and it is a bit weird to see that happening in almost total silence. It still has the Pentax way of AF, steady movement to the focus plane, then stop, and often a tiny correction to get spot on. Have not really timed it, but moving focus from 1 meter to infinity seems to take close to half a second. I'll probably use it quite a lot on my holliday the next few weeks and post some stuff on my gallery after that ... Regards, JvW ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jan van Wijk; http://www.dfsee.com/gallery -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
