Familiar story :)
Still, I think the 70-210 Series 1 is pretty much unbeatable as far as
value for dollars (or pounds or whatever) spent in concerned. I bought
mine off eBay for $20.00 because it had a stuck diaphragm. I planned to
repair it and sell it at a profit. After the repair I thought "Well,
let's just try it out for a few shots to see how good it really is
before I sell it". That was three years ago :)
I'm pretty ignorant of what lenses are good and what aren't... and
I don't tend to trust my own judgement. I bought my VS1 70-210 after
pouring over your webpage. It was a toss-up between the gen2 with
constant aperture and gen3 with auto aperture (albeit faster on the wide
and slower on the telephoto). What finally pushed me to the gen3 was the
larger macro. In retrospect, the auto is *very* convenient on the -DS.
I bought a Sears 135mm f/2.8 awhile back on ebay for $20 with a
Vivitar 2800 flash (my brother needed the flash). Oily aperture that was
fixed with some disassembly and solvent. It can take some pretty good
portraits according to my ignorant eye.
K-mount... lots of (old) bang for the buck.
-Cory
--
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* Cory Papenfuss *
* Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student *
* Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University *
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