| Latest Review Posted | SMC Pentax 17mm F4 Fish-Eye
With this lens my search for a relatively affordable wideangle ended (so far). Like all M and K lenses, it's very well built and a pleasure to use. The ring to switch the inbuilt filters seems also very reliable; when shooting on digital, i guess only the skylight and uv filter are very useful (the other ones are nice on black and white though).
It's a compact lens, which is very important for me, and the reason why i wouldn't buy a wide angle zoom. With this lens (as with other primes), you remain rather discreet. Add to that the extremely wide angle of view, and you have a fine lens for shooting people discreetly (you don't have to point the camera at them, but they'll still be in your frame).
As long as you don't have straight lines towards the edges of your frame (on digital), this lens makes for a fine wide angle, without a very annoying distortion. Of course, if you would want the distortion, there's endless fun to be had with the curves this lens can produce. I guess this makes it a horrible lens for architecture, but it does very well for landscapes, cityscapes and street- or people shots without too many walls or straight lines.
At a maximum aperture of f4, it's indoor use is fairly limited though, and as this lens is made for a wide depth of field, there's no playing with the bokeh. Then again, that's not what you get this lens for. And the slowness is compensated by it's short focal length, allowing you to use longer shutter speeds handheld. So it levels out ve... |
