[Snydly]

I purchased a 50-135 a little over a month ago. It was packaged badly, and the hood was broken. There were other problems so I sent it back and received a new one.

I may be having problems with this one as well. Almost every picture is soft at the focus point. I've done numerous tests with newspapers and charts, and the spot focus point is always soft. I hand focus, then auto focus and the focus indicators move about 75% of the time, usually around 2 inches as best I can tell. I tried to adjust my k7 to see if I could align it, but nothing changed. I tried 'All' lenses and 'one' lens adjustments. It didn't make any difference. I feel like my camera might be the problem as I should see some movement on the focus point when adjusted.

Anyway, I thought since it was back focusing most of the time I could live with that since I shoot pictures mostly of faces, and would normally have the aperture at or above 4.0 which would get the face in focus due to the greater DOF. I'm seeing most of my kids faces a little soft at the point of focus (usually their nose). Does anyone else have this problem? I don't want to return this lens because even though I have had fun getting some nice old (and new) lenses, and the kit lens and 55-300 are great, this lens is astonishing to me. Mostly because of the color and OOF areas. I can't stop taking pictures. It seems pretty sharp, but it doesn't seem to be twice as sharp as my kit lens or other nice lenses, but it IS at least twice as nice with the color and bokeh.

I'm going to try to post a picture here. If it works, I used spot focus on the yellow part of the flower and recomposed slightly. Please take a look at this and see if you can spot my problem.

Also, my manual focus has a slight amount of play in it when reversing directions. Is this normal for this lens?

Thanks

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[kytra]

Maybe you could shoot some text because it is hard to tell the focus accuracy with flowers from this distance....

Anyway it seems soft to me. I had this lens and it should be as sharp as a "set of primes" so I would not compromise on this because this lens is supposed to be a professional one so is the price and this issue should not get overlooked.


Try it with another Camera and if the lens is still bad, send it back and get it calibrated/replaced.

Good luck!

[Snydly]

Thanks kytra.

What's the best, quickest and easiest way to see if you have a lens problem? I've seen recently that there are 'centering/decentering' issues, focus issues and softness issues with some lenses. This is pretty frustrating. I don't like spending a lot on equipment, but will if I know I'm getting something decent. I'm not stuck on reviews though. The review of the K7 in dpreview is not that glowing, but I wouldn't trade mine for anything else on the market right now. To me it's not about megapixels or ISO or fps etc. It's about getting a good photo and having a great interface with your equipment. For example, does any other manufacturer have anything resembling a green button? That is a superb feature.

Anyway, I love Pentax, but no matter how good the cameras are, if the lenses don't match, I have to think about getting a different system. This is the first time I've been frustrated with Pentax.