Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
07-09-2015, 11:36 PM
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Nearly all of these reviews are amateur reviews (as in the reviewer doesn't review lens for a living) and so there is no normalised approach to what is good or bad or what the evaluation criteria should be. I approach them much like pentaxus does - discard the outliers and focus on the common middle ground. There can be many reasons for the outlier reviews from a bad copy of a lens through to the reviewer having very little photography knowledge. Discarding the outliers works well for the common lenses where there are lots of reviews. The obscure lenses with only one or two reviews can be a lottery as to what the true qualities of that lens might be. Once you have been on this forum for a while, you also get to know whose opinions you trust and respect and understand what sort of shooting they do. So if I see those people posting with a lens review, I weight that review more highly in my assessment.
As to the M85/2, the blue fringing at F2 outdoors makes me avoid that aperture outdoors full stop. By F2.8, it is down to levels easily dealt with in post processing and near gone at F4. My suspicion is that F2 is intended for indoors controlled lighting situations where the contrast that brings out the blue fringing can be managed appropriately. My copy is seriously sharp and it renders skin tones very naturally. And in a fabulously small package to boot, as you observe. And once you get into the swing of things, green button metering is no hassle at all (unless you are trying to follow a subject moving in and out of different lighting levels which is where automated exposure earns its keep).
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