Brian, I've been using Pentax 18-250 for a bit over an year now. While its overall optical quality is inferior to most of my lenses, I find myself using it most of all my lenses. This is probably because majority of photographs I took in the past year were related to dances (American Swing dances, Argentine tango), where the wide range of focal length (wide-to-tele) is very useful.
As for the cons, as others wrote, - the optical quality is particularly degraded beyond ~200mm. Also, I find the autofocus to be on the slow side and sometimes it misses, especially in the low-light situations (with *ist DS). E.g. My 12-year old Tamron 70-300 appears to have a faster AF. Manual focusing is ok, but the range of the focusing ring is rather small, - hence it might be a bit more difficult to focus it exactly manually, especially for those who is used to MF lenses. Most of the photos posted here http://42graphy.komkon.org/swing/ starting from April 2008 are taken with this lens. I've been thinking what I could replace this with, and couldn't come up with any reasonable idea. Pentax and Tokina lenses are the same glass- and design-wise, but there was an unconfirmed statement that they may have different optical coating. I hope this helps, Igor On Apr 12, 2009, at 03:55 , Brian Walters wrote: > I'm contemplating getting a wide to tele zoom as a "walk around lens", > when I just want to carry a camera and a single lens. I'd like > something that starts at around 18 mm and goes to at least 135 mm. > > I'm aware of the Pentax, Tamron and Sigma 18-250 mm zooms but that range > seems to be asking a lot of optical design. Does anyone have experience > with any of these? Are the Pentax and Tamrons pretty much the same thing > under the skin? > > Are there any other affordable options? -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
