Originally posted by Jonas B Hi Mr B
I know what a roadmap is. I can whine about it without blushing: The roadmap is published by Pentax as an advertising thing, someting that is presented to customers as a future to come. This is clearly done to make people interested in buying into the Pentax system.
I don't care about a 35/2.8 macro. I care about a DA 35/x SDM. They are both on the roadmap and supposed to be here by now, or at least pretty soon. To me the new fast, silently focusing (with quickshift) normal lens was advertised to be here now, not in a year or so.
[/whining]
regards,
Hey I won't try to stop you whining. Check some of my recent posts and you'll find I can be a fairly prolific whiner myself
Now having said that... I can see why a 35mm f/2 (which is what I assume the X to be) would be preferable to an f/2.8... I can't see why the SDM would be such a massive benefit though... a fast 35mm without SDM will still have very fast autofocus because it is a fast 35mm, and being a DA lens it will also have the clutch AF/MF system. As for noise, personally I don't find non-silent AF such a bad thing (because AFAIK the DSLR shutters aren't silent yet)... my main point though is that it is already possible to buy a fast AF 35mm for a Pentax dSLR. It's not a DA and doesn't have SDM but it is there... sure it would be nice if we could now have a 35mm f/2.8 and 35mm SDM to go along with the 35mm f/2, but then there would be a choice of at least 3 fast 35mm lenses - not forgetting that 35mm will be covered by the (fast) 16-50mm! That's potentially four ways to get a fast 35mm... meanwhile there is no currently available fast telephoto zoom from either Pentax or any third-party. That's why IMO that end of things is being (and should be) prioritised by Pentax.
As for when the 35mm lenses are supposed to be here... to be fair to Pentax, that roadmap gives no dates at all for them or even "Near Future", and in the case of the SDM it doesn't even give a max aperture, so in this case they haven't failed to deliver, because in this case they didn't actually say when (or in one case what) they would deliver... unlike in the case of the 16-50 and 50-135 however where the roadmap clearly says "Available in the near future", and shops were told when the lenses should be available... which proved to be "optimistic".
Originally posted by Ivan Glisin However, the "missing" lens IMO is DA*22mm F2 SDM to complement DA*55mm F1.4 SDM. A pair of high-quality and fast moderate wide and moderate telephoto lenses should be everything most photographers would ever need.
Thanks for pointing out the two 35mms. First things first, let's not forget that
all of the lenses on the roadmap are "missing" right now in the sense that none of us can actually use them as of yet.
As for a 22mm f/2... well we all have our own ideas of what would make the system more complete... for you it's a 22mm, for me its a 70-200... but I'll say this: You won't get very far trying to tell most photographers that they only need a moderate wide and a moderate telephoto lens
just look at all the people who buy expensive dSLRs only to stick 14x zooms on the end of them... please don't misunderstand, sometimes I am happy to walk around all day with a single prime lens or two, but it's far from everything I'll ever need, and any company will have a hard time persuading most consumers that it's all they need either.