I've always had mixed feelings about my pfa 50/1.4. There have been times when I really needed the extra 2/3 stop of speed that it gave me over my f/1.8 glass. When you're shooting slower than 1/15 second and your subjects are moving, that's a critical difference in speed. On the other hand, I never really gained any affection for it. When I use a super tak 50/1.4 I can forgive it a lot because of the beautiful way that the manual focus feels. I bought my DA 40 for its size, but quickly grew to love the pictures it took. If my FA77 were a woman, I'd be tempted to propose marriage. But the PFA 50/1.4 is almost the dirty little secret in my lens bag. When I need it, I use it, but I almost never just put it on the camera to go shooting. I'm more likely to grab the DA40, or especially now, the 16-50.
A week or so ago, I took some shots that made me wonder if something might be wrong with it. I was also using a teleconverter at the time, so I wasn't going to automatically blame either piece of glass. I just spent some time doing some trivial sharpness tests, and it turns out that between f/1.4 and f/2.0 it gets a lot better, and much better yet by 2.8 Which, I guess, is the reputation of the lens. Soft wide open, but reasonably sharp if you stop it down a bit. I suppose there are a couple of reasons I hadn't really noticed this before. The first one is that when you're pushing the sensor as hard as you can, and shooting at some stupidly slow shutter speed, the loss of sharpness from running the lens wide open was barely going to be noticed. Another likely reason is that I don't actually spend a lot of time pixel peeping, and as glaringly obvious as something might be at 2:1 on a 24" monitor, it may not be nearly as obvious under normal use. So, I guess that there really isn't anything wrong with the lens, and now I think I know why I never really fell in love with it. For that matter, the ridiculous sensitivity of modern sensors are going to pretty soon make it totally unnecessary to shoot with any glass faster than f/2.8. But, part of me is still rather disappointed at how sharply performance dropped off at the wide end. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
