Hi Jester...just saw your post today while researching a problem with my lens. I have the same lens with the exact same problem and was wondering if you ever found out your problem. My lens is only 3 months old and I picked it up one day to use it and first thing I noticed was the lens looked really dark. It seem it just decided on its own to not work. It won't focus on anything. I'm going to send it away but I'm a little leary on their terms of "misuse and abuse"...since I don't know alot about lenses (newbie) they could come back and give me a bunch of technical jargon about whats wrong with it and say its from misuse and I wouldn't know the difference. As far as I know I didn't do anything wrong...just picked it up one day and it didn't work. Hope you can help me out. Thanks