Pentax-DA 15mm F4 Limited Review

Construction and Handling

Unsurpsingly for a Limited lens, the 15mm F4 has an extremely solid metal build with no flimsy parts.  Weighing in at just over 200 grams, the lens will barely put a dent in the overall weight of your camera (unless you're adapting this lens onto the Pentax Q!).  It's also very small: with the hood fully extended, it measures about 2 inches in length.

Just in case not all our readers are familiar with Pentax lenses: the Pentax "Limited" designation doesn't mean that a lens is produced in small quantities (although special limited silver or colorful versions of "Limited" lenses have been produced in the past).  It merely denotes compact, well-built prime lenses with a metal finish, premium image quality and, consequently, hefty price tags.

Pentax 15mm Limited on a K-5
Pentax 15mm Limited Mounted on a K-5 DSLR with grip.

Holding and Using the Lens

The 15mm is extremely easy to hold when used with a Pentax DSLR, and the grip shown in the photo above stands the camera up very nicely.  You can hardly feel that there's a lens on the camera!

One great thing about this lens is that it features Pentax's Quick Shift focusing system, meaning that you can step in at any time and make a manual adjustment to the focus without changing your camera's focus mode.  This is great for fine-tuning the focus or intervening manually whenever the autofocus (AF) system focuses on the wrong spot.  The focusing ring is sufficiently big to be easy to turn, and the focusing throw is very short, so you won't have any trouble making adjustments.  Unfortunately, the focusing ring does turn when you use AF, but this was likely unaviodable given the lens's small size.  Normally short throw isn't favorable for those who use manual focus a lot, but as this is an ultra-wide lens, this isn't as big of a concern.

The fact that the lens features a built-in hood saves you the trouble of mounting/reversing a removable hood, and its petal shape ensures that the shadow it casts is as large as possible.

The lens cap that accompanies this lens protrudes slightly so as to prevent the hood from sliding out when it is stowed.  While this is a nice touch, we found that the cap is a little bit annoying to put on, as you have to screw it in and retract the lens hood fully as well.  Fortunately, however, Pentax have managed to make both the lens cap and front element much smaller than in the film days, as this cap is much better than the unlatched monstrosity that came with the original SMC Pentax 15mm F3.5.

Pentax-DA 15mm F4 Limited and A 15mm F3.5

When compared side-by-side with its full-frame/film counterpart, one can truly appreciate how small the 15mm F4 truly is.

49mm filters can be used with this lens, though they will quickly produce vignetting if they are too thick.  If you do decide to put a filter on your 15mm lens, we recommend that you also pick up a 49mm clip-on cap and ditch the original cap.  If you want a clip-on cap with the Pentax logo, you'll need to get Pentax item #31536, which retails for under $10.

To sum things up, we have no real complaints about this lens once the cap is out of the equation.  Its unobtrusive size and light weight make it a pleasure to use!  One last thing we would like to add is that the 15mm focal length appealed to us greatly on digital, as it offers an extremely wide field of view without going overboard or forcing excessive distortion.  We see the fine build quality and small size of this lens as icing on the cake!

Lens Photos

Here are some additional photos of the Pentax 15mm Limited lens.  Click to enlarge.

Pentax 15mm Pentax 15mm
Pentax 15mm Pentax 15mm

This lens is made in Japan and then assembled in Vietnam.


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