First, I see the A50/2 regularly for $20 or thereabouts.
All of the A50s are very sharp lenses. The 43 is sharp enough but has two other characteristic trade-offs to consider. One good, the other bad.
I've used two different samples of the lens, so these comments should be consistent with the line of them.
1) Barrel Distortion The barrel distortion is not apparent at all aperture/distance settings. Experiment with it to find where it works best for you. I was happiest with the results when distance shots and stopped down to f8-f16. Close-ups were good, too. But wide open shooting was an issue. It really showed up there.
2) Image representation. I'm not much on lens designs, but after going to LF I can appreciate the differences more now. 35 lenses have so much design compromise in (even the best of) them that it's really hard to find a lens to give the same feel as LF. Despite talk of "3-D effect". Give me a good plasmat (that I can afford) any day. For compactness, Tessar and triplet designs are nice as well. When used in a situation and setting to provide the best results the 43 does represent an object very well. That's more important to me than any sort of resolution rating. Because they're all really sharp. But if the object is misrepresented in that sharpness, then something else is lost.
Collin
"You impress at a distance, but you impact a life up close. The closer the relationship the greater the impact."
Howard Hendricks
