A True Classic: One of the best Pentax lenses
Pros:
Wide aperture, Razor sharp optics, Solid construction, Compatible w/All Pentax K-Mount Cameras, incl digital
Cons:
Expensive (but worth the price)
The Bottom Line:
Few products are perfect, but this legendary lens couldn't be better and deserves an Excellent rating.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Are you unsatisfied with the pictures from your fancy new SLR? It's probably because it came with a cheap, slow zoom lens: you might as well be using one of those built in lenses that come on point & shoot cameras.
Why this lens?
Prime lenses have several advantages over their zoom cousins. Most notably, the widest you can get a zoom lens is about f4. This is not enough for getting effective depth of field shots where you want the background blurred, and it doesn't give your camera enough light to capture images in low light situations, say, indoors. It also makes it harder for the camera to focus in low light. 50 mm has long been the de facto SLR lens, because it provides a field of view/magnification similar to what the human eye naturally sees.
Construction & Operation
The first thing you'll notice, even before taking it out of the box, is that this lens is heavy. This is the sign of some serious quality optics— although it might be more convenient, the mark of a bad lens is light weight. The outer casing is solidly built, and the focus ring is rubberized for better grip. The aperture ring also has raised lines for the same purpose. Neither adjustment ring has any wobbly play, and the focus turns with neither sticky slowness nor accidental movement-prone looseness. Take a look at the front of the lens- unlike the 1.7 version of this lens, the glass goes right to the edge. This is a KAF lens which features lens information contacts, autofocus and auto aperture.
Photo Quality
This lens takes fantastic photos. It enables you to take photos indoors without flash or tripod, get night shots without absurdly long exposures, and shallow DOF compositions with beautiful, even blur. Like all other Pentax lenses, it is super multi coated to prevent chromatic aberration, the nasty colored fringes that can appear around edges in cheaper lenses. To see samples taken with this lens, click here: http://www.pbase.com/cameras/pentax/smc_pfa_50_14 If you're serious about taking advantage of everything your SLR has to offer, start with this lens.
