Hi all, I had another play around with this lens during the weekend.
Yesterday I loaded some Provia 100F and took it down to my lens "proving ground" and did some test shots. I had my manual focus Tokina SL 400mm f/5.6 there as well so I could do a bit of a comparison. I intend to sell the Tokina now but I'd like to know just how much better the Pentax is. To be fair during the test I focussed both lenses manually using the body's focus confirmation. The Pentax is definitely nicer to use than the Tokina. The manual focussing is a lot less damped which I find important for a long lens. Not quite as nice as Cotty's 300mm f/2.8 which I could focus quickly and accurately with my little finger, but pretty good anyway. The clutch mechanism is brilliant. It is very easy to pre-focus then flip the focus ring forward and let the body [Z-1p] take over. The tripod shoe is very well positioned and offers heaps of clearance when attaching or removing the body from the tripod-mounted lens. With the Tokina lens I could not fit the Z-1p with the lens mounted on the tripod. I had to either remove the grip strap base or take the lens off the tripod, because it interfered with the head (Manfrotto 029). After doing the "official" test I took the lens off the tripod and started pointing it at some gulls on the field. I couldn't fault the AF in that situation but I think a focus limiter would have been a nice addition to a long lens that focuses down to 2m (6.6ft). The Z- 1p can have difficulty focussing on close up branches at times and a limiter would reduce any hunting. The limit switch is something I love about my FA100/2.8 macro lens when working at non-macro distances. When I tried to track some flying gulls with continuous AF I found that the limiting factor is my ability to keep the bird centred in the finder. I am going to need a bit of practice. And plenty of spare batteries :) This morning [Sunday] we had a visit from the neighbour's cat so I took a few pics of her, getting pretty close to the minimum focus distance. The focus was never a problem... but I would like to get my hands on an MZ-S for some extra AF sensors. I doubt those photos will turn out very well due to camera shake. I intended to do some more shooting this afternoon but didn't get the time. I haven't finished my slide film off yet but I'll have the print film back from last week's playing on Thursday... Cheers, - Dave http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ (out of date) - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List.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 .
