> I've read at few places on the net, that an old SMC 55/2 K is the > best Pentax standard lens in terms of pure optical quality, > regardless of maximum aperture and other factors. Is that true?
> Maximum aperture is not important for me at all, it is the f5.6 - > f11 kind of performance that I'm after - but of course, it would > be nice if it is also good wide open. Aleksandar: Regarding the K 55/2: I've never owned that exact lens, but I have owned one of the K 55/1.8 lenses. However, the two lenses are really the same - both are actually f/1.8 lenses, except that Pentax took some of the 55/1.8's and added a restrictive baffle to them to reduce the aperture to f/2, in order to sell them at a lower price (leaving the "faster" 85/1.8's to sell higher as "premium" 55mm lenses). Strange marketing concept, but remember that this is Pentax we're discussing here, right? <g> Anyway, when testing the resolution of that one K 55/1.8 that I had, I found it was fairly soft at larger apertures, but that it became quite sharp starting at f/8 (but not at f/5.6, where it was still somewhat soft). The most unusual thing about the lens was that it changed so ~dramatically~ going from f/5.6 to f/8. Unfortunately, its sharpness advantage compared to all the other normal lenses I tested occurred only in the center - its edge sharpness was sometimes less than that of some of the newer Pentax MF normal lenses. Remember, though, that these were only the results of testing one of these lenses against all the others. See <http://www.cetussoft.com/pentax/resolutn.htm>. All in all, I still think that the ~A~ 50/1.4 is the best all-around Pentax normal lens (and I guess that the F and FA versions are optically identical) (but it seems as if the K and M versions are not quite the same). Fred - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
