Hi, John. > While I'm on the subject of niggles two of my > pet hates are:
> 1. Lenses whos focusing ring turns in the opposite direction to a genuine > Pentax lens. (Congrats to Sigma on the Syncho II lenses) This is something that is less important to me now than it used to be. At one time, I found it pretty frustrating to find myself turning a focus ring in the wrong direction with certain 3rd-party lenses. However, I've eventually gotten used to this (since there are some 3rd-party lenses - especially all the sweet VS1 lenses that I cherish - that are too nice to not use because they focus the "wrong" way). Nowadays, when I mount a lens on a body, my mind sort of switches into either a "focus to the left mode" or a "focus to the right mode", and only rarely do I catch myself focusing in the "wrong" direction. Unfortunately (although less of a nuisance to me nowadays), all of the Vivitar Series 1 lenses I've used focus in the "wrong" direction. As I've alluded to above, though, there are too many really neat VS1 lenses to ignore just because of this. The other brand that I've used a lot lenses from is Tokina. Back in the "RMC" days (before the AT-X lenses were introduced, Tokina lenses (at least the ones I've tried) focused "backwards" compared to Pentax lenses (just like the VS1 lenses). However, starting with the AT-X lenses, all of the AT-X lenses I've tried have focused just like jen-you-wine Pentax lenses. In fact, Tokina catalogs and/or magazine ads for a while even mentioned that the lenses were manufactured so that they would focus in the "manufacturer direction" (which, I assumed, meant that they must have had some mirror-image assembly lines to accommodate both directions). > 2. One touch zoom lenses that 'zoom out' when you pull the slide towards > you instead of 'zooming in'. (Spent a lot of time at M/cycle races!) Unlike the focus direction problem (which I've sort of gotten used to, as mentioned above), this is a serious consideration for me. Fortunately, though, almost every one of my one-touch zooms focus the same way, zooming in (i.e., zooming to a longer focal length) when the zoom/focus ring is pulled toward the mount end of the lens. It has been my experience that this has generally been true with a lot of the older constant-aperture zooms, but is more likely to be "backwards" on the variable-aperture zooms. (I am sure that there must be a number of exceptions to this generalization, but it has worked this way for me, as a rule.) Since I generally do not care for variable-aperture zooms (unless there are any overriding optical considerations that just cannot be ignored), I am quite used to one-touch zooms functioning as you describe. The one lens that comes to mind, that I still have that is "backwards" for zooming, is the VS1 70-210/2.8-4 Q-DOS lens, for which I simply put up with its "backward" zooming (but, since the Q-DOS 3-D effect is more pronounced at the longer FL end anyway, I end up using it racked out - or is that "in" - at the 210mm end most of the time). Fred
