My Favorite Lens: the Pentax FA 43mm Limited

By Ash in Favorite Lenses on Oct 22, 2011

I'm torn between three lenses for this title of 'favourite lens', namely the Pentax FA 100 f/2.8 macro, the FA 43 f/1.9 Limited and the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8, but since portraiture is my favourite genre, it is only fitting I choose the lens that does this genre justice for me...

Prior to the purchase of this little gem, I wondered how much better portraiture could truly be than what I'd already been producing with the FA 50 f/1.4 lens. I was well pleased with the FA 50's ability to thro backgrounds out of focus pleasantly, but felt the colours, contrast and texture rendition of subjects could have done with a boost. Enter the FA 43 f/1.9 Limited.

It surprised me with how striking the results turned out for such a small and 'slower' lens. As opposed to the FA 50 f/1.4, it is sharp and has very little loss of overall image quality when used wide open. Love at first shot. Now it's a go to lens for reasons even beyond its size and IQ.

Practical and amazing images every exposure.
A very special, and legendary lens.

FA 43 Ltd at f/2

FA 43 Ltd at f/4.5

FA 43 Ltd at f/5.6

Post by forum member Chex

This, out of my line up of lenses is a no brainer! Hands down it's my FA 43mm Ltd for it's decent speed, unparalleled sharpness (especially @ f4) and amazing FA-LTD rendering. I usually end up using this for everything from portraiture to landcapes and Pano's and long exposure shooting, even water drop photography! This lens spends the most time on my K-5 by far, probably 60 % of all my K-5's shots or more. It's simply hard to beat its tack sharp resolution and the way it renders it's images. Those are things you sure can't "fix" in PP work!

I was lucky to pick this lens up PERIOD, when my K-5 order came in, my 18-135 rainy day lens did not come in at the same time. So the shop owners father (and former shop owner) came down and brought down his 43ltd he was willing to part with since he moved to a Nikon FF (he still won't tell me what other goodies he has in Pentax). So I gladly picked it up that day and have been thankful ever since... sure I could have grabbed a SMC tak 50mm f1.7 or 55mm f1.8 to at least have a lens to play with, but I'd done my homework on the base Pentax lens lineup thanks to this forum! So now between this, my SMC Tak 28mm f3.5 and my Tamron adaptall 23B (60-300mm), I'm covered until my budget allows.. FA 77 might be my "next favorite lens" when I get one.. insatiable LBA!

More info about the FA 43mm