Having horsed around with the K10D for a few days with the kit zoom 18-55 mkI. These are as far as I know, not regarded as the sharpest tools in the drawers so I have just been mucking about with it.
I took delivery of a second hand 50mm FA f:1,4 today. As one do on new lens day, I fired up the K10D and shot some stuff indoors, and lo and behold, softness galore. The camera seems to be back focusing quite a bit.
The head picture had a solid AF lock on the left eye, but what is actual sharp is the hairline. I will try it out in a more controlled environment with tripod and such, but it was an interesting find.
I had put the perceived softness of the earlier days onto the zoom, it being known to "soft" being a factor in my assessment, but the 50 should fare better, even fully open, or perhaps especially fully open. I think it wouldn't necessarily be so out in the open, so to speak with a deeper field of view or with a less close-up/detailed shot. Taking it out for some General Purpose photography later and will see what I find, then.
Having had a browse on the Pentax forums, I found this gem of an article in regards to doing the necessary correction, so will try my hand at the fix somewhere down the road.
In other ponderings, I have the 21/f:3.2 inbound second hand and have musings about the AF35/f:2.0 for the classic trio of primes with an outlier in the Lim 70/f2:4.
This should give me 31.5/52.5/75 mm or 35/50/75 equivalent set up and should be more than enough for a "second" tier sensor trial (and error) system and somewhere beyond the horizon, a 105mm. A bit to late, I finally grasped onto the idea that if I had built it around M42 Takumars, I would have been left with a lens system that would have been adaptable to every vintage Dslr I would ever fancy, but hey-ho, that is a plan that will hold for the forseeable future. The K10d is anyhow rumored to be somewhat iffy to manual focusing anyway, which is what tilted me towards the AFs in the first place.
It does make me wonder if the same problem was present in the K7 as well? I came back into hobby level photography with that and the AW kit zooms, but I never really bonded with it as such.
I took delivery of a second hand 50mm FA f:1,4 today. As one do on new lens day, I fired up the K10D and shot some stuff indoors, and lo and behold, softness galore. The camera seems to be back focusing quite a bit.
The head picture had a solid AF lock on the left eye, but what is actual sharp is the hairline. I will try it out in a more controlled environment with tripod and such, but it was an interesting find.
I had put the perceived softness of the earlier days onto the zoom, it being known to "soft" being a factor in my assessment, but the 50 should fare better, even fully open, or perhaps especially fully open. I think it wouldn't necessarily be so out in the open, so to speak with a deeper field of view or with a less close-up/detailed shot. Taking it out for some General Purpose photography later and will see what I find, then.
Having had a browse on the Pentax forums, I found this gem of an article in regards to doing the necessary correction, so will try my hand at the fix somewhere down the road.
In other ponderings, I have the 21/f:3.2 inbound second hand and have musings about the AF35/f:2.0 for the classic trio of primes with an outlier in the Lim 70/f2:4.
This should give me 31.5/52.5/75 mm or 35/50/75 equivalent set up and should be more than enough for a "second" tier sensor trial (and error) system and somewhere beyond the horizon, a 105mm. A bit to late, I finally grasped onto the idea that if I had built it around M42 Takumars, I would have been left with a lens system that would have been adaptable to every vintage Dslr I would ever fancy, but hey-ho, that is a plan that will hold for the forseeable future. The K10d is anyhow rumored to be somewhat iffy to manual focusing anyway, which is what tilted me towards the AFs in the first place.
It does make me wonder if the same problem was present in the K7 as well? I came back into hobby level photography with that and the AW kit zooms, but I never really bonded with it as such.
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