Site Supporter Registered: November, 2006 Location: Norway Posts: 705 1 user found this helpful | Review Date: July 15, 2013 | Recommended | Price: $4,000.00
| Rating: 10 |
Pros: | Sharp | Cons: | Slow focus | Sharpness: 10
Aberrations: 9
Bokeh: 10
Autofocus: 6
Handling: 7
Value: 9
Camera Used: K-5 IIs
| | This lens is exceptionally sharp on all focal lengths and wide open. At 300mm it is sharper than DA*300/4 stopped down to f/5.6. And at 400mm it is sharper than FA*400/5.6. It does have som green and red CA, but not much and easy to remove. The weakest point with it is it’s slow and noisy autofocus. But it has a good focus limiter which helps. An expensive lens, but worth it if you need it. | |
Administrator Site Webmaster Registered: September, 2006 Location: Arizona Posts: 51,609 5 users found this helpful | Review Date: February 11, 2012 | Recommended | Price: $3,000.00
| Rating: 9 |
Pros: | Superb image quality, flexibility of a zoom, fast af | Cons: | Poor handling (af/mf), heavy | Sharpness: 10
Aberrations: 9
Bokeh: 9
Autofocus: 10
Handling: 6
Value: 7
Camera Used: Pentax K-5
| | First off I'd like to mention that I believe I got a pretty good deal on this lens back in the day- seeing that the FA* 250-600mm (which has the same optical construction as this lens) now goes for $6-7k, I would expect the typical price range for this to be about the same, and thus I am only giving the lens a 7 for value.
The F* 250-600mm lens is extremely sharp and is a pleasure to use. At over 12 pounds, however, it is quite heavy and cannot be hand-held even if you try, due to its size. You'll need an appropriately-sized monopod/tripod for it, and you will need to exercise caution while mounting it, as the lens is front-heavy.
It uses a single ring to control both the zoom and the focus. You can slide the ring back to convert into into a focusing ring, and forward to make it control the zoom. The lens also features a focus limiter which can be configured to a number of settings covering just about every distance range, but interestingly, it also has a "manual focus" setting. Thus, in order to disengage the AF shaft, it is not only necessary to slide the ring back, but also to set the limiter to manual focus, making it very inconvenient to manually override the lens's focus in the field. This is one feature upon which the FA* version of the lens improved - on that one, sliding the (dedicated) focusing ring back disengages the AF shaft and allows you to control the focus right away.
As long as you stick to AF, however, this isn't a problem, and that's when the limiter itself really comes in handy. On top of that, the AF is quite fast thanks to the lens's internal focusing technology.
One thing I really like about this lens is how short the zoom throw is. You barely need to turn the zoom ring in order to go from 250 to 600mm (thanks to the internal zoom construction)! While power zoom would be nice, my primary complaint is it doesn't have separate rings for focusing and zooming.
The image quality, as would be expected of any professional telephoto zoom lens this long, is superb. Aberrations are minimal on digital and sharpness is top-notch. The price you have to pay with this lens is the loss of one stop of light compared to the 600mm F4, though I usually find myself shooting closer to 250mm than 600mm when on ASP-C cameras, meaning that if it were a prime, it would be borderline useless most of the time as I wouldn't get the shot I wanted. So, in other words, it's much better to have the F5.6 zoom than an F4 prime. If I had the chance to swap lenses for free, I wouldn't- the zoom is just too convenient!
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