| Latest Review Posted | SMC Pentax-FA* 200mm F4 Macro ED [IF]
Back story
It's interesting how I ended up with this lens. I scooped this lens when an fleabay seller had 4 copies for sale. I just happened to look at what they were selling for Pentax one evening and this lens popped up literally at that very second. It came with a reasonable BIN price which I immediately hit without even thinking twice.
The seller put up 3 more of this lens subsequently without BIN prices and each one sold for more and more money. In hindsight all 4 lenses sold cheaply because this lens now fetches north of $3,000 on fleabay.
A Pentax rep told me a year later that particular seller had purchased all the salesmen's samples in the country as well as a bunch of other high quality Pentax samples for resale.
Ergonomics
This is a fairly hefty lens and a tripod is required to get the best out of it. The push-pull design for manual/autofocus is a very handy feature, most of the time I am in manual focus mode when doing macros.
In low lighting situations I can use a macro flash bracket and with great working distance. However the tripod mount is a tad on the small side; having said this, the mount is perfectly useable, I just wish it were a touch larger.
There is a large area for grabbing the lens barrel for focusing, a very handy and useful feature.
The front of the lens does not rotate when focusing. This lens is internal focus -- a very, very nice feature. There is no racking in/out when focusing. Thank you Pentax!
The manual f... |
