My DA* 16-50 good or bad?

fishy · 07-15-2008, 06:23 AM

Sorry to start a new thread on this one, but I'll be leaving for a long (+1 year) trip very shortly. To have a good general purpose lens I bought a DA*16-50 Since they are hard to come by in the Netherlands, I bought one with Adorama, in the States.

Now I do not really know what to expect of this lens; it seems better than my Sigma 28-70 2.8, but falls (way) short of my FA 50 1.4

Do I have a dud (and should I return it) or is this what I should expect? Anyone have experience returning lenses from the Netherlands (inc import taxes)? Is there a service centre I can take it to? Would that help? Etc.

Sample images are posted in this thread:
DA* 16-50mm Serial Number Database.

All advice is appreciated!

*sinus007* · 07-15-2008, 12:01 PM

Hi Fishy,
It's hard for me to judge from those pictures.
I took a risk with 16-50. When I'v got it I conducted a simple and unscientific test: put the camera (k200d) on tripod, taped a newspaper to the floor, made sure that the floor is horizontal, made sure that the back of the cam is also horizontal, thus making the object and the sensor as close to parallel as I could with this simple setup, and took a bunch of pictures @ different f-lengths and apr. Then compared 100-200% crops of sides and center, especially @2.8. Turned out I bought a good one. Sad thing to say about pentax, but, hey, what can you do...
Hope this helps - Good luck

AK

fishy · 07-15-2008, 12:16 PM

Hi AK, thanks for your reply.
Could you show me results of those tests? I tried a similar thing, sing a really flat book, but I can not guarantee they're really parallel. In general the edge softness (especially on the right??) seems really bad. Center sharpness is not much worse than my FA50 1.4...
Sad thing indeed that we gamble with lenses at this pricelevel.
see newer testshot below:

*sinus007* · 07-15-2008, 06:32 PM

HI,
Unfortunately I deleted my test pics.
Following advise some very knowledgable folks @dpreview, I couldn't stress enough the importance of the cam and paper being parallel.
AK

fishy · 07-22-2008, 11:27 AM

I did a more representative test (less light, proper chart) and it looks a lot better now.
I think the fringing looks like softness. It has a LOT of fringing frim wide open allt he way to say F/5.6, but it is not as soft as I feared...