| Latest Review Posted | SMC Pentax-A* 300mm F4
I picked up a lightly-used copy of this lens a few years back, and it has done admirable duty for me ever since, shooting slow-moving wildlife and deep sky targets mostly. Lack of autofocus and long focus throw means this isn't a lens for trying to catch birds on the wing unless you do some clever pre-focusing and have a lucky shutter finger.
Cons:
Contrast is a lacking when you shoot this lens wide open, but improves rapidly until it is just about perfect at f5.6. Even at its worst, it is easy to fix in post.
Images also suffer from a fair amount of purple fringing in certain challenging lighting conditions or super high-contrast situations - occasionally bad enough to be hard to fix in post. Most of the time, it isn't an issue though, and I've never noticed any green/magenta aberrations of note.
The minimum focusing distance is also a bit on the long side, though I didn't pick it up expecting a macro lens.
Pros:
Quite sharp for its era.
The lens is quite compact and easy to handle for a manual lens with such a long reach. It's small enough that with a sturdy tripod, I don't miss a tripod collar.
Produces good images with pleasingly smooth bokeh even up to f8 (depending on distance). It would be nice if it got as wide as f2.8, but I'm not rating it on what I wish it was.
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