| Latest Review Posted | SMC Pentax-A 24-50mm F4
This lens makes an excellent walk around lens for any camera, but it is especially useful on my crop sensor K20D where all the rest of the A series zoom lenses don't go wide enough to be useful and any A series primes wider than the 35mm cost too much when you can even find them. The 24mm is wide enough for whole scenes or large objects, and the 50mm can be used to snap individual people from a distance. You won't be using this for many flower pictures though, it works OK but its sorta the anti macro lens, more suited to fields of flowers.
It can be a tad slow indoors or in low light compared to a prime but at about 400 ISO which is easy to do in high quality with modern film or even my somewhat older K20D, its perfectly fine. Its a short enough zoom range where you can get away with picking a middle number like 35mm for the shake reduction to have it work just fine, though I usually turn it off anyways by habit.
My like new copy has very thin grease in it which makes the zoom ring almost undampened and it has a tiny amount of side play in in the front element/zoom ring(the grease normally takes that up in these lenses), this could be fixed with a servicing but it doesn't effect the pictures so I haven't bothered yet.
I bought the correct Pentax screw on rubber lens hood for this and it works well on this lens even on FF film cameras at 24mm. I would recommend a hood and possibly even a protective filter as the very flat outer lens element is almost level with the end ... |
