[robbiec]

As is the case with Consumer Reports - whose priorities often differ from mine - a person of any brains will skip their summary and look at what underlies it, namely the photos.

Individual thought (using your brains) is frowned upon don't you know - people in general are becoming dumbed down, easier to control. Soundbites are all they take in by in large fed by the omnipotent media and advertising giants. You know that as being a Pentaxian you're a niche, an outlier, we all have different reasons, some like the tactile feel of a high end K Series camera, some bought in because of the value, some because of the lure of the Limiteds, some by the romanticism of capturing the moment with a digital update of what a company in Japan understands the core essence of photography to be. But we're still a niche which is a fantastic place to be because we've broken from the herd, and our faith / patience is being repaid with best in class optics or optics that have in unmeasurable intangible rightness to the images they help produce.

[Rondec]

As is the case with Consumer Reports - whose priorities often differ from mine - a person of any brains will skip their summary and look at what underlies it, namely the photos.

Did you look at their galleries? Sigma 50mm F1.4 DG HSM Art: Digital Photography Review and Review: Nikon Z 50mm F1.8 S: Digital Photography Review versus HD Pentax-D FA* 50mm F1.4 SDM AW review: Digital Photography Review

There are very few similar images that you can compare. I want strongly back lit shots at f1.4 and f2 with all of the lenses, not just the DFA *50 so I can really compare. Truthfully, I wish they had done similar shots with the Nikon and Sigma, not just shot less stressful shots with the DFA *50.

[ffking]

In a rare moment of non-aggressive-defensiveness, our friend with a PhD on the DPR staff said this:

"For now we check comparative LoCA by testing lenses side-by-side using a target that we first focus on, then rack from slightly back-focused to front-focused. This gives you a good idea of the amount of LoCA you might experience in the real world. The Nikkor 50 S had effectively no LoCA, whereas the Pentax glowed bright magenta and bright green around our target as we defocused. So we don't really need a fence shot to know the Nikkor has little to no LoCA."

To be honest, if they genuinly run a series of the rough tests with alllenses then zero in on any weaknesses they've found, that would be an acceptable if not perfect way of assessing a lens. The real issue is the weighting they put on their findings, and the rather odd assumption that thier criteria are all that matter - it's tantamount to saying that the the designers are incompetent rather than that a choice was made by the Pentax engineers to allow a certain amount of loCA in order to achieve some other objective. I for one ould rather have a 'fault' that was avoidable by shooting decisions, and anyway not actually very noticeable most of the time even when present to something like noticeable onion ring bokeh hich is always unpleasant.

[monochrome]

@ffking Nikon designed a lens specifically to score high on tests. Pentax designed a lens specifically to deliver the unique Pentax style of pleasing image. We know what to do with a Pentax lens. That DPR doesn’t get it reveals that Pentax has not successfully explained their philosophy to DPR. Had Pentax done so their reviews would start, “Pentax is different. Their philosophy is to accept a small amount of (imperfection of the month) in order to deliver their idea of a pleasing image.”

[monochrome]

Don’t hold your breath. One of their testers, when challenged on the moving target test (the bicycle test) with the K1 admitted that they don’t even try for consistency because “the real world isn’t consistent”. I don’t like the term gobsmacked, but that is what I was.
They fall back on the “we are a review site, not a test site” lame excuse when their methodology is challenged, yet they put pseudo tests out there.
The entire review portion of their website is a confidence game.

I commented on the thread last night, “Now that you have silently edited the caption on the cat photo from f/3.2 to f/1.4 to reflect the actual EXIF value are you also going to correspondingly change the text in the body of the review? LoCA is not prominent at f/4 in any of your sample photos.”

The Mods deleted my post. Silently. They’re soft-censoring me.. They’re as dishonest as Twitter.

[c.a.m]

I commented on the thread last night, “Now that you have silently edited the caption on the cat photo from f/3.2 to f/1.4 to reflect the actual EXIF value are you also going to correspondingly change the text in the body of the review? LoCA is not prominent at f/4 in any of your sample photos.”

IMO, that's a fair comment. I would say that in the sample images in the gallery, LoCA is practically insignificant at apertures of f/4 and narrower, even in images that were shot against the sun or in very harsh lighting. There are examples of LoCA, certainly, but they're prominent mainly in a few images at the widest apertures. It appears that it's difficult to provoke detrimental LoCA with this lens.

While DPR's reviews should be lauded for including extensive sample images at full resolution (RAW and JPEG), the nature of the images is inconsistent across comparable lenses. For example:

Pentax D FA* 50/1.4 gallery:

• 88 images
• 26 were shot wide open (30%)
• 35 at f/2 or wider (40%)
• 37 images (42%) were shot against bright light or sun, or in very harsh lighting.

Sigma 50/1.4 Art:

• 48 images
• 7 shot wide open (15%)
• 11 at f/2 or wider (23%)
• 9 (19%) against bright light or sun or in harsh lighting

DPR's deletion of your post raises a question of their editorial integrity, especially if it was done silently and without a follow-up comment from one of the DPR reviewers. I think the action also reinforces the lack of credibility of the review. Their main criticism of the lens -- LoCA up to and including f/4 -- is not backed up by a sufficient number of sample images. Geez.

- Craig

[ffking]

@ffking Nikon designed a lens specifically to score high on tests. Pentax designed a lens specifically to deliver the unique Pentax style of pleasing image. We know what to do with a Pentax lens. That DPR doesn’t get it reveals that Pentax has not successfully explained their philosophy to DPR. Had Pentax done so their reviews would start, “Pentax is different. Their philosophy is to accept a small amount of (imperfection of the month) in order to deliver their idea of a pleasing image.”

So the root of their attitude towards Pentax is that Pentax doesn't take any notice of them, perhaps?

[beholder3]

I commented on the thread last night, “Now that you have silently edited the caption on the cat photo from f/3.2 to f/1.4 to reflect the actual EXIF value are you also going to correspondingly change the text in the body of the review? LoCA is not prominent at f/4 in any of your sample photos.”

The Mods deleted my post. Silently. They’re soft-censoring me.. They’re as dishonest as Twitter.

They have been doing this all the time, just the frequency is going up.

The paid posters there don't manage criticism very well (especially when based on facts which they can not reject as pure opinion) and prefer censorship.

The worst you can do is ask pointed fact based questions to the paid posters directly. Those will either get ignored or deleted/censored.

The line between simple censorship and lies / propaganda is not very thick.

[wings]

I hope to get one of these soon.

[zmohie]

I got mine from B&H. What a moister lens. It is the first time I could get very sharp and clear pictures wide open with a pentax lens.
Never happened with fa 50mm even at f 2.8 or more.

[totsmuyco]

I hope I can afford one in the future. I'd like to do lots of portrait in the future.

[Class A]

I'd like to do lots of portrait in the future.

It's absolutely fabulous for that.

Some people are of the opinion that portrait lenses need to be longer but I don't agree. It of course depends on what you are going for but 50mm (and even below) achieves a much more personable look than the flat images one gets from very long focal lengths.

[Class A]

In their recent "When fast-ish is fast enough: in praise of F1.8 lenses" article DPReview state that

"Technically speaking, all of the lenses I just mentioned are among the best of their type that you can buy."

and the list of lenses mentioned include the (not quite correctly named) HD D-FA* 50/1.4.

Sadly, they didn't use the opportunity to point out that the Limited series (the three amigos) were exactly designed with the point in mind the article is trying to make (f/1.8 is fast enough most of the time and allows size/weight advantages).

With the focus on Nikon lenses and making "imperfect comparisons" to "make a point", the article comes across more like an excuse for the lack of fast lenses in the Nikon Z system, rather than a genuine appraisal of small and compact lens designs. For starters, the main point does not only apply to f/1.4 vs f/1.8. I'd say if Imaging-Resource had written the article, they would have given a nod to the Pentax APS-C system with its many purposefully "slow" lenses designed to prioritise system compactness over speed.

[sbh]

Although it costs a lot of money, it is worth every penny.

[y0chang]

One funny thing about the DPR article is that the images at least to my eye are the best images I've ever seen out a fast 50mm. The backlit cat image is one of those. So its like DPR talked about all the problems with the lens, yet totally forgot the fact that it creates beautiful images and isn't that the most important thing for a lens to do?