I bought an SMC Pentax 300mm f4 recently, which should be a great 300mm lens and allow me to sell my other 300mm lenses. But before they go, why not test them to see how they stack up? Since it's an unusual collection, I borrowed one lens from
Marc Sabatella to add more interest to a wider audience. Thanks, Marc, and I found good things to say about it.
Here's the lineup:
SMC Pentax 300mm f4 - 77mm filter size, 4m minimum focus distance, 1050g. The biggest lens, with awesome build quality and an integral hood. A tripod mount would be nice. (Manual focus)
Vivitar T4 300mm f5.5 - 62mm filter size, 6m minimum focus distance, 870g. An older lens, this does have a tripod mount and integral hood. It has the T4 mount so you need an adapter; I used a modified T4-M42 adapter. They are not very expensive on eBay. (Manual focus)
Quantaray 70-300mm f4-5.6 Tele-Macro LD (IF) - 62mm filter size, 0.95m minimum focus distance, 520g. This lens is identical to this Tamron
model. It has the most magnification ratio of the group, a bayonet hood, and it's not too big. (Auto focus)
Tamron XR 28-300mm f3.5-6.3 Macro LD (IF) - 62mm filter size, .049m minimum focus distance, 460g. This superzoom has a few different models. This one is the A06, supposedly better than the 72mm filter version, but not the OS model and no Di coatings. It has a bayonet-mount petal hood. For testing I used the Quantaray hood because it had more coverage. It's way smaller than the others, just barely bigger than the kit lens, with a zoom lock. (Auto focus)
SMC Pentax-F 100-300mm f4.5-5.6 - 58mm filter size, 1.5m minimum focus distance, 620g. This is the oldest Pentax 100-300mm model. I keep forgetting which one is considered the best. It's internal zoom and only gets about 8mm longer when focused to the minimum. I used a 58mm metal hood meant for the Takumar 200mm f4 for testing. (Auto focus)
All these lenses cover the 35mm frame too.