Originally posted by yucatanPentax So, now besides my manual lens fetish, I'm going to be searching for something that covers that 35-70mm range that Rico mentioned in an AF lens, as well as reconsidering what I have in my manual lenses.
The budget winner is the F35-70, usually around US$50 by itself, often for less when sold with a SF-1 or other 1990s AF body. The smallest zoom Pentax ever made, agile (fast AF), sharp as a bag of primes. Don't leave Earth without it. If that's too pricey, AF Promaster (Tamron) and Quantaray (Sigma) 28-70s can often be found cheap.
Quote: (I had expected that longer telephoto shots would have been more common.)
Long teles are very useful and I love using the DA18-250 to get context shots at one end and grab details at the other. Most of us probably don't use it at the long end so much. But if we need the reach, it's there.
Quote: Doing a review of your pile of digital shots can provide some revealing information. The 18-250mm would cover a lot of what I do, but I still find that manual lenses help my composition by forcing me to move around.
AF (super)zooms are great when we don't know what to expect, or can expect diverse opportunities. MF primes of any length force us to stop and look and move.