Originally posted by Timothy I have very little interest in long lenses, let alone exotically long lenses so I've been following the rumours surrounding the 560 in the name of lazy curiosity, largely since it's nice to see a camera or lens maker do something new. But I was under the impression that the 560 is:
-very awkwardly shaped, and one would imagine balanced...
-lacking or limiting exotic elements...
-as fast as a garbage truck...
...all in the name of being cheap.
Though I acknowledge that there has been some frankly insane pricing decisions committed by Pentax in the last little while, it benefits them to have the cheapest extra-long option for novice birders, astrophotographers, and sports-shooters (or merely those on a budget). It does not benefit Pentax at all to have a single extreme telephoto option which is harder to transport, has a less advanced optical design, and is significantly slower than a comparably priced third party option (which is incidentally available in the other mounts as well). As I mentioned above, I don't follow the prices of long glass very closely, but I really do feel that for this lens to make any impact it needs to be under US $2000. In other words, at $4000 I yawn and read some reviews, at $1600 I start telling myself that I should really be taking more bird pictures. That's one market. The other is people who already knew they wanted to take bird pictures, and at $1600 they have some incentive to switch systems.
Also, with regard to the trade off between the focal length and aperture, I cannot imagine a possible world where 60mm of reach would cost as much in dollars as two thirds of a stop of light gathering. But if it were, Sigma has a 500mm f6.3 for around $1000 (and it comes with your choice of a free 150mm f5.0 or, for a few hundred more a 50mm f4.5).
Now I never said anything about mediocre, but it has to be cheap because, if not, well what the the hell is it? And who the hell is it for?
I kind of agree here. People for a long time thought Pentax would make the first sub $2k FF camera. There has also been the thought that Pentax lenses are cheaper overall as well.
Anything over $3k for this lens is probably too much. If sigma can make a 150-500 zoom and sell it for $1k, then I can't see how Pentax can't make a 560 f5.6 for say under $2.5k
Of course it will probably be $3800 as rumoured which means I'll look at the bigma instead. Still the lens is using nothing exotic, is longer to bring the price down as well.
The price of the DA560 is what i most want to learn from Photokina.