It's Christmas time, and I have an itch for a new FF lens, a desire - I readily admit - that is totally decoupled from any actual need. Indeed, I'm fortunate to own the three amigos, an A* 85/1.4, a DFA 100 macro, my wonderful DFA 28-105 and a DA* 300. Still, the itch is undeniable, so I decided to look at Pentax' current offerings, something I've not done for at least a couple of years. I discovered that Pentax now offers the DFA 15-30/2.8 zoom which seems very cool, but decades of experience have shown me that lenses wider than 28 mm (in FF terms) seldom find their way on my camera for some reason, and the size and weight of the of the DFA 15-30 (not to mention the cost) are off-putting, at least for me. There are a couple of telephotos in the catalog, but they're also big and heavy, and I've got the "big and heavy" category already covered with my 300.
Then it dawned on me, I have - after all these years since my last film SLR - a FF camera but lack a classic 50 mm lens; the focal length is, of course, covered with my 28-105 and my FA 43 comes pretty close, but - hey - it seems only fitting to have a 50 for my K-1. It's OK to succumb to mysticism on rare occasion as long as you recognize you're doing just that.
There appear to be three choices. Of those, I owned an FA 50/1.4 in the past and found it to be more-or-less useless until stopped down to f/2.8, and the new DFA 50/1.4 is overkill (for me) in size and price. So . . . . . I think I'll get a DFA 50/2.8 macro; it's reasonably fast, has a macro function and - best of all - it's cheap, a mystical combination if I ever saw one.
Jer