Hi everybody, Many here know that I shoot a lot of interiors and architecture. Although happy with my 15/3.5 and other lenses, I was in the market for a K 18mm, which is known to be the best corrected ultrawide lens made by Pentax (mainly wrt distorsion). Well, I had found once a guy in Rome selling one of those for 500 euros. I sent him a message asking for more informations, he replied saying that the lens was ok and asked for 600 euros... (!?!) I passed on, that time, as you can guess. Recently another ad showed the same price of 500 euros. There was no sure evidence, but the seller seemed to me the same of the other time (same first name, although different email address). I called him and managed to meet him in Rome last Tuesday. We met near his office and I started checking the lens, you know, the usual things. It was far from brand new, and had a little scratch on the front element (along the edge, though, so I thought it wouldn't have affected the pictures). Mounted on the LX I had brought with me the infinite was a little closer than it should (say at 15m), and looking through the finder the edges seemed a bit soft. He was indeed the same guy of the first ad, and there was something indefinable that suggested me to stay away from that lens, but I'm a strange guy, so I bought it.
Fortunately I planned to stay in Rome that night, hosted by a friend of mine, Maria. I met her near her place and immediately after we had to pick up a female dog of a friend of her who lived in another part of the city (Rome is quite big...). So, for more than a couple of hours I almost forgot to check better the 18mm. Then we had dinner and eventually got back to her flat. There I started to check the lens better and found it to distorce quite a lot... What? Wasn't it well corrected? And what's that strange softness that stays there even when I stop down the aperture? I didn't sleep well that night... In the morning my friend Maria had to wake up early but when her alarm clock started ringing I was up already... Before the breakfast I spent half an hour taking pictures of the buildings in the street and of every straight line I could find. Then I took a couple of pictures with the lens completely stopped down. There was a 1 hour lab near there so I rushed in as soon as they opened. In the meanwhile I was trying to contact the seller at home and on his mobile phone without success. Needless to say, I was starting to worry. When I had the prints in my hands I was more than angry. The lens behaved like it had collected all the possible optical flaws... It's performance was closer to a - imperfect - glass marble... Apart from the center (bad anyway) there was nothing sharp in the pictures, not to mention the corners which got darker when stopped down. At f/22 there was a evident vignetting - the kind you find when you improperly stack filters on a wide angle. I found that the vignetting was caused by the mount of the built in filters. The seller had said that he had the lens CLAed by somebody there in Rome so my guess is that they weren't able to mount the lens back in the right way. I was eventually able to find the seller on the cell phone and proposed an exchange (he had something else interesting to sell). We scheduled an appointment, at the same place of the day before, during the lunch break. He said it should take few minutes to go from the office to his house, so no great problem. When I was waiting, quite in advance, I sent him a message saying: don't forget the money in case I don't want to buy anything else. He replied something like: 'I have no time to waste, I already spent the money so the choice is to you, or the 18m or the others. Bye'... I called him immediately. I used my calmest tone, but at the same time I tried to let him understand that he was trying to cheat me and I wasn't the last of the idiots. He tried to apologize and said that a lot of people does the same, buy a lens, then want him to take it back, and so on. He even said that he had to go back and forth... I then told him that if he had to drive for 5km, I had driven for 200, and he hadn't even lost a day at work. When he said that he didn't run a shop so I shouldn't ask for my money back I replied: 'the fact that you don't run a shop doesn't give you the right to be dishonest.' To make it brief, I had my money back. He saw the pictures and agreed that the lens did not work. I did offer him what I thought was right for the other two lenses he was selling (about 2/3 of what he was asking - really too much) but, after thinking about that for far too long, he refused. He wanted the pictures I took to show them to the repairman and I was so silly to give him the prints without asking for the money I paid to that expensive lab... Now, guess what? He then sent me a message with two pictures he took last year and asked me if those showed the same problems. I pointed them out and then he replied that he had found the same defects in other pictures he took with the 18mm recently... A nasty experience, to say the least, but luckily it ended well... ...enough. Gianfranco ===== __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
