From that picture, yeah I can see your cause for concern, that lens is horribly flawed. The green of the grass has brown patches in it, the right side of the picture is very clowdy, the sky is totally blown out with white spots, man, what a bummer. Sorry to tell you man, but you got a dud.
Has anyone ever thought to consider how much money we are costing Pentax to have to 'replace' all of these 'defective' lenses and in turn where that cost is going to get filtered back to... yeah, you guesse it, US!
I am not saying that you need to eat it on a truely defective lens, but c'mon, if you are willing to drop $700 on a lens and are unable to tell wether or not the thing works properly...
Quite the contrary, I am almost certain that you know wether or not your lens is working properly, and it is by the way, but all of the fear and skepticism that has been drawn up about this lens has put the buyer into panic mode where they can no longer reason for themselves and require outside reassurance for what they already know.
Selar, I am by no means picking on you, for you are not alone. I was skeptical at first before making the purchase, I openly admit it, but to the same degree, I posted my good fortunes of getting a lens that lives up to my expectations to counter all the negative ones out there about faulty equipment being sent out.
I understand there are people out there with genuine defective equipment, but I dont want all of the bad press to filter down into a 'Red Scare' if you would. There are plenty of DA* owners on this board that have great success with the lens, and you are included with this statement.
So as I said earlier
Originally posted by Buddha Jones: You have minimal vignetting and almost no barrel distortion. You are free to go and start shooting. Do us proud.