[Kerrowdown]

What lenses were you dissatisfied with?

That will be any lens that I have ever lusted after and subsequently not owned.

[hcarvalhoalves]

Get the cheap little F35-70. Smallest zoom that Pentax ever made; very agile (fast AF); sharp as a bag of primes. It's what I used today whilst walking around town.

I've seen some macros here on PF and it looks good, indeed.

I wouldn't call the build 'crap', just 'non-metallic'. Mine has apparently seen some hard use over the decades and still functions perfectly. Polycarbonates are tough.

Well... the DA kit lens is plastic too, but feels much better built. I say "crap" not just because it's plastic, but because it's cheaply built. It zooms creeps, the focus makes it wooble a lot and AF is not particularly fast. That's part of why I think it's a gem: inside the cheap construction lies some great optics.

[G and T]

Definately my most hated lens ever was my Sigma 70-200 f2.8 HSM, the images were always soft and the colours and images were flat and dull and the reason for buying it was the fast AF which was fast only when it worked. The HSM died 3 times so it was off-loaded before the warranty ran out, and it was replaced with a Tamron 70-200 f2.8. The Tamron is the Polar opposite of the Sigma, reliable,super sharp, wonderful colours,images that are almost 3D but its screw drive AF is a little noisy. The Sigma's only redeeming feature was its quiet AF but it became too quiet once too often!

[Digitalis]

perhaps the worst lens from Pentax I have ever had the misfortune to work with would be the SMCP-DA 16-45mm f/4 ED AL, my copy had some nasty decentering that was painfully obvious* in the upper right corner.


*well it was obvious to me - without pixel peeping, I can't help it if I have a good eye for spotting optical flaws. If I see a really big print and an egotistical photographer beaming "look at how big I can print!" I cannot help but look for optical shortcomings in the image and point them out to him, and with lenses shorter than 100mm it gets pretty easy to spot them.

Perfection: A goal that may never be obtained, but the quest is fun

you bet it is.

[drei3]

I was dissatisfied with the Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8 EX DG. It's how I learned that I like shooting with primes and wider zooms.

Also, I wasn't overly satisfied with the colours, especially when comparing with the DA 40mm

[Matchete]

I was really disappointed with the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8.

After reading the rave reviews I expected a really sharp lens only to discover that it was much softer than my DA 16-45 f/4 at the wide end and produced much less vivid and contrasted pictures.

As if it wasn't bad enough, the 4 copies I've tried exhibited underexposure, and back/front focus at varying focal lenghts making the issue uncorrectable even with fine AF adjustment on my K-5.

How can a lens be held in such high esteem by the majority of photography forums with such a terrible quality control ?

[Edgar_in_Indy]

How can a lens be held in such high esteem by the majority of photography forums with such a terrible quality control ?

I've wondered that myself.

I bought the Tamron 17-50mm in 2010 after reading all the positive reviews, but returned it when I discovered that it underexposed by half a stop at f/2.8 (effectively only achieving f/3.3) and underexposed by a full stop at f/10. And based on many other first-hand accounts, I don't think the problem was restricted to my lens. But yeah, it's a great lens if you don't mind the max aperture of f/3.3 and the strange exposure behavior.

My experience, with pics demonstrating the underexposure:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-slr-lens-discussion/124013-tamron-...-k-x-pics.html

Definitely my most disappointing lens, since my expectations were so high.

[Raffwal]

FA 50mm f/1.4. I originally bought it to have a really fast lens with a shallow DOF. But it's very soft wide open. Admittedly it sharpens quite a bit stopped down, but what's the point of a large aperture lens if you can't use it like that?

[Laurentiu Cristofor]

FA 50mm f/1.4. I originally bought it to have a really fast lens with a shallow DOF. But it's very soft wide open. Admittedly it sharpens quite a bit stopped down, but what's the point of a large aperture lens if you can't use it like that?

It is not soft, it is the shallow DOF that you are noticing. Most likely you focused in the wrong place and the place you wanted to focus on is OOF.

If you want to see what a soft lens is about, check a later version of the Jupiter 9 - that is soft. The FA 50 is just like most other fast lenses - lacks some microcontrast wide open, but resolution is good enough if you focus it properly.

[Wheatfield]

The most disappointing lens I owned was the Nikkor 50mm f/1.2. Mine was the "new style" from the early 1980s. It was all bokeh wide open, and soft when stopped down.
And it fell apart on me a few times.

[Raffwal]

It is not soft, it is the shallow DOF that you are noticing. Most likely you focused in the wrong place and the place you wanted to focus on is OOF.

Well, I'm glad you know my lens better than I do.

[dominikkolendo]

hahahahahaha!:

Originally posted by Laurentiu Cristofor It is not soft, it is the shallow DOF that you are noticing. Most likely you focused in the wrong place and the place you wanted to focus on is OOF.
Well, I'm glad you know my lens better than I do.

seriously, i felt EXACTLY teh same about the FA50 1.4, i sold it on CL and recently got a 43, which is such an improvement that i can't believe pentax still sells teh 50.

[RioRico]

We don't use Fast Fifties with razor-thin DOF like a 50|55/1.2|1.4 because we expect edge-to-edge flatfield sharpness wide-open. We use them because they can capture images that are otherwise impossible. If you want wide-open sharpness in a thicker field, use a wider slower lens. My pancake Meyer Helioplan 40/4.5 and Loreo PC 35/11, and the DA10-17/3.5-4.5 and Tokina 21/3.8 etc, are all immensely sharp wide-open. But I don't much use those for action or dimness or subject isolation.

My Yashica ML and SuperTak and FA 50/1.4's and Tomioka 55/1.4 are all very sharp wide-open -- within a very thin non-flat subject field. My MacroTak 50/4 is also very sharp, in a much thicker field. I do not use the f/1.4's and the f/4 for the same purposes. Those f/1.4's, and my K50/1.2, and all my various 50-55's in the f/1.7-f/2.8 range, are splendidly sharp when stopped-down to f/4. But when I open a Fifty to f/1.2-f/1.4, it's not because I want to count molecules at the image edges.

In other words: Different tools for different purposes. Cheers!

[Wheatfield]

We don't use Fast Fifties with razor-thin DOF like a 50|55/1.2|1.4 because we expect edge-to-edge flatfield sharpness wide-open. We use them because they can capture images that are otherwise impossible. If you want wide-open sharpness in a thicker field, use a wider slower lens. My pancake Meyer Helioplan 40/4.5 and Loreo PC 35/11, and the DA10-17/3.5-4.5 and Tokina 21/3.8 etc, are all immensely sharp wide-open. But I don't much use those for action or dimness or subject isolation.

With my Nikkor 50/1.2 I could capture any image I wanted, as long as what I wanted was a soft image. Seriously, I have never seen a softer lens.

[Class A]

The FA 50/1.4 is soft up until f/2.8. This is not a shallow DOF issue, but well known spherical aberration taking its toll. The 50/1.7 has a higher degree of spherical aberration correction which makes it sharper below f/2.8 but also gives it harsher bokeh. The FA 50/1.4's bokeh below f/2.8 is not nice either. I guess on FF the lens comes more into it's own but on APS-C, it's not great under f/2.8.

There is a reason why Pentax created the 55/1.4 which is much better wide open.

The lens that disappointed me the most was a K50/1.2. Low contrast, bokeh wasn't fantastic and the colours were pretty yucky. OK for B&W with quite a bit of PP but definitely not worth its going rate. Maybe the copy I used was out of whack in some way.