Originally posted by Alex00 Don't compare tamrom to DA*. It's like comparing silver to diamond. Da primes are known to offer the best quality and are compared to cannons and Nikon's best lenses optically. If you read cannons forums, you'll be amazed at how many users complain about the lenses and failures.
Again we all would like to see Pentax extending the warranty on those lenses, but that doesn't make them bad lenses as you claim.
Boy some of this verbiage sounds like it's straight off an advertisement. For the record, I was an early adopter of both the DA*16-50 and DA*50-135, before any SDM issues came out. The 16-50 was replaced under warranty because it was de-centered. I was not so lucky with the 50-135, which had an SDM failure
13 months after I bought it. Pentax "gave me a break" on the labor costs, and the total was about $160 from my pocket. And to top it off I got back someone else's refurbished unit, shipped with a broken lens hood.
If I were making the decision today on what lenses to buy,
no I would not choose an SDM lens.
What is your lens collection like? What is your level of experience, aside from parroting back whatever you've read? What lenses have you bought, used, sold, traded, or borrowed to arrive at this conclusion, after three weeks of owning a DA*50-135, that IT is the absolute best? I would put my Tamron 70-200/2.8 up against my 50-135 any day, for image quality, and I doubt you could tell the images apart- and the Tamron's screw-drive has faster AF as well! "Silver vs diamond"?
As far as that goes, I've had the Tamron for just over a year, the time of reckoning for my Pentax SDM lens; well, there
is an issue with the Tamron requiring service, but guess what? I've still got
5 more years of warranty left, so I'm covered! No worries!