In my OPINION as owner of silver FA43’s 0000831 and 0011208 there is no distinguishable variance in their image quality. #831 sems to have a different, bluer coating cast, but is that attributable to glass tweaks, coating tweaks or imagination?
I believe it is unknown how many higher lead content blanks Pentax had on hand before the EU prohibited manufacture of such glass, and unknown how many copies Pentax had in stock before final sale was prohibited.
But I’ll hang on to the older lens ‘just in case’.
Last edited by monochrome; 04-21-2018 at 07:19 PM.