I love my 55-300. It's a great general purpose telezoom. Works great for portraits. The focusing makes a ton of noise and not the best if you are trying to be discrete around wildlife.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alohadave/tags/smcpda55300mmf458ed/ On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Zos Xavius <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm looking at getting a 55-300 for birding. On the flipside I'm > looking at a K 300mm f4 for a bit less money. My primary use would be > birding and portraits and the occasional landscape where the 55-100 > end of the range would get used mostly. I hear the the 55-300 is f4 up > to 135mm or so, which makes it actually kind of ok for portrait use. I > have a fairly beat up copy of a Takumar 70-200 f4 from the 80s that > I'm finding quite useful since I long ago retired my dust-pump Tamron > 60-300 SP. The Takumar lacks SMC but is multicoated, and is > surprisingly sharp stopped down to F8 and seems to be optimized for > the long end. I'm actually liking this lens and for portraits its kind > of a sleeper. Not bad for a $30 kit consisting of that lens, a K1000, > an M50 f2, and a Tamron 2x teleconverter (in KR mount) as well as an > old mini flash and crap wide angle lens adapter. The tamron was junk > (rebranded chinese crap), so I knocked the elements out and have a > nice 25mm extension tube with contacts. I'm getting off topic from my > post though here.... > > I guess I'm looking to see what you all think of the 55-300. I would > like to get a couple of long primes eventually like a 135mm and a > 300mm, but to me such lenses are only to serve specific purposes. A > zoom would be somewhat more convenient and would give me a kit that > stretches from 12-300mm. I know that the 300mm end isn't the sharpest, > but would it be ok for birding? I'm half tempted to just get another > 70-200 that's better and maybe pick up a decent 300mm prime later on. > I'd love an FA* 300, but that's certainly a bit out of my price range > right now. One day though..... > > any thoughts? > > -- > 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. -- David Parsons Photography http://www.davidparsonsphoto.com Aloha Photographer Photoblog http://alohaphotog.blogspot.com/ -- 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.
