Just picked up a Q7 from a member here. A K mount adapter arrived and today finally had a chance to try it out. Wanted to see how far I could see. Well! It turns out you can see pretty far!
My houseboat is maybe 350 feet (? someday I'm going to measure it) from the far shore. It drives me crazy that all manner of wildlife are on that shore (coyote, ducks, geese, heron, eagles, osprey, you name it) and even my longest lenses can't reach it for a decent shot. I thought for a while about the Nikon... um... the one with the ridiculous reach, but discounted it because no raw (and not Pentax!). And the Q just seemed like fun. So I popped the Q7 onto the Sigma 150-500 and had some fun.
Below are a few photos of my tryout today. VERY boring pictures, but I just wanted to get an idea of the reach at various focal lengths. One conclusion I reached is that I definitely need one of those scopes all the Q folks have on their cameras/lenses. Because you really can't rely on the Live View fooling you into believing you have this in perfect focus... I absolutely did not. Neither did I do my regular camera check in (eg: terrible sensor dust, now gone). To be fair, it was pouring rain today and dark as heck. But the little Q held its own, though forcing some pretty slow shutter speeds for most of it.
So, for what's it's worth, here's a little photo journal of the adventure:
The first shot is with the great little Q01, standard prime, just to show the distance we're talking about
:
At 150mm:
At 210mm:
At 250mm:
At 300mm:
At 400:
At 500mm:
And a few geese at 500mm, same distance: