Originally posted by cbaytan And finally 31mm looked as a mediocre lens to me (in here) , no Pentax colors, not good in resolution, I am surprized, but this is the first time I am looking at ltd's pictures.
cbaytan, I had missed this post till this morning when I read it for the first time. I'll pixel peep, I admit it. How else to check for critical sharpness? I will crop a photo in a micro second to get the composition I want. Isn't this a form of pixel peeping? Especially shooting my telephotos, mainly because I can't afford the reach I need. So, to better explain myself, I will pixel peep mainly to see if I got the focus I was after (usually I manually focus and I'm constantly checking myself to see how I'm doing. I believe this has improved my manual focusing abilities, but I digress) and I will peep when I get a new lens to see what it's capable of. I like to know my equipment. I don't pixel peep countless pictures of brick walls and post threads complaining about the extreme lower right corner or some such bs about a lens compared to some other lens. How many times have anyone shown a picture of theirs to a non photographer friend and have them complain about the lower right corner? We are harsh judges here, we look at a LOT of pictures and we zoom in on all kinds of stuff a regular person never sees. This is good because it pushes us to ever improve our craft but we aren't normal, lol, I mean, seriously. Normal people look at pictures and if it strikes some chord in them, they react emotionaly and think it's a great picture and if it doesn't, they quickly skip on. They don't look at the lower right corner.
That said, I remember the first pics I took with my 31 Limited. The first one was out my back door, I had read about it's flare control so I took a pic of my neighbors RV that had the sun shining on some metal portion of it's top, there was no flare, none, damn I thought. That evening in the house I took an available light shot of Spike wide open. I had never seen bokeh so creamy and the transitions so smooth. So I zoomed into 100% and my jaw dropped, I zoomed to 200% and couldn't believe my eyes. I had never seen a lens look like that at 200%. The 77 Limited is close but I'm not prepared to say it's better. The DA* 300/4 is close but I'm not prepared to say it's better either. And the 43 is almost as close.
In my opinion your statement that the 31 Limited is not good in resolution is wrong, in fact it's resolution is incredible. It's colors are incredible. It's incredible:-). If I sound like a FA 31Limited fanboy, I am. The thing about the 31 Limited is that it doesn't just do any one thing really nice, it does everything really really nice. People are always challenging it and they should. When you claim to be on the top of the heap you are open to challenges. When you are brazen enough to charge the going rate for the 31 Limited you are open to challenges and people are going to pick at you endlessly, but the FA 31 Limited still sits on top of the heap.