Ken, As always I appreciate your glimpses over the "inside". What I find most interesting now is the hint to the build costs (point 2). I suspect a major contribution to the cost was due to having to maintain very low tolerances and this perhaps is associated with manual assembly in the now closed Japan factory(?). Anyway, a friend recently disassembled several FA consumer zooms and was horrified to find out large tolerances by design, alignment through shimming as a rule, high wear plastic guiding rails - all of these easily leading to misalignments of moving optical groups, both relative to the optical axis and the image plane. Optics that are rather good delivered sub-average or inconsistent results mainly due to poor mechanical design and manufacture. It's hard to believe that Pentax might apply the same cost reduction to the DFA macros - traditionally some of their best lenses - but I cannot help wondering if common and molded parts policy sufficed to lower the production costs enough to make the goods profitable.
Servus, Alin KT> BTW, I read an interesting statement by a Pentax lens designer on new DA KT> macros. I list only on DA 100mm macro. KT> 1. It is a brand new design (as opposed to 50mm version which basically KT> purged flare spots (kind of ghost) caused by CCD. Otherwise no changes for KT> 50mm), taking into consideration the future reduction of the barrel size. KT> FREE design contributed to the significant reduction of the size. KT> 2. FA100/50 macros have been one of the most well selling lines of Pentax KT> lens lineup, but they were also money losers (cost was higher than the KT> price). The more they sold, the more did they suffer from red :-). KT> 3. Therefore, they now use many common parts and injection molded parts, KT> whereby they should make money while maintaining the price points. KT> 4. They swear that the performance was not compromised. KT> Re above item 1 (future reduction of barrel size), I noted that the filter KT> size of this lens is 49mm vs. current 58mm. Return to more like M series KT> lenses? KT> Re above 4, this was uttered in rather an informal occasion and I have every KT> reason to believe that this was true (not a propaganda). KT> But to me, the size of the new DA macros is as important as their optical KT> performance. KT> Cheers, KT> Ken
