Quote: This report was obviously written on the silver 43mm Limited lens, which is difficult to find and quite expensive when you do. However, the black version is at least available and in stock with most retailers who carry Pentax. At the time of writing, it's available for between $560 and $650 online. This is quite a price to pay for a prime lens that doesn't seem to have any real stand-out strength, other than its physical characteristics and tack-sharp images. But if you want a small, lightweight, and stylish lens that doesn't suffer from geometric distortion and you aren't really picky about your focal length, this lens will make a nice addition to a Pentax prime collection in your bag.
This review is funny because it does not complain much at all about the lens, other than focal length and price.
The focal length argument strikes me as odd because
A) people use zoom's all the time at any focal length they please,
and
B) with a crop-factor, most lenses we use are of oddball focal lengths.
Overall I would suggest that the reviewers largest gripe is that the lens is not a bokeh machine like the FA 50 1.4, and that the lens is expensive. Overall I would not think that this reflects much on Pentax's reputation, because most of their lenses are considerably more affordable, and they do make lenses that are "bokeh machines". The FA 43 is about sharpness.
As a lens-maker, Pentax has a pretty solid reputation, other than the SDM issue, and the few duds that every company is bound to produce. If anything, Pentax has taken a lot of heat for
1) The limited selection of ultra-expensive, high performance zooms that only professionals could afford,
and
2) Their camera bodies, which have lagged behind the competition if one is to compare specification sheets.
However their bodies have a habit of offering features other companies cannot claim (TAV mode, green-button metering with entry-level cameras, affordable weather sealing, etc.)
Pentax also does not have a very robust marketing department compared to the giants.
Hope that helps. If you talk to most people who know their cameras, they would not suggest that Pentax has a bad reputation... but rather a maligned one. They used to be one of the greats in the public's eye.