135mm lenses

When I was out walking the other day I spotted this nice stately home (Markyate Cell, supposedly the home of the "Wicked Lady", a notorious highwaywoman...). I thought it would be fun to compare shots taken with the three lenses I had with me capable of 135mm: the DA* 50-135mm, the Tamron 70-300mm (aka the purple fringe monster) and the SMC-K 135mm f/2.5. ISO was set to 200 ASA, aperture at f/8, white balance on auto. All were handheld. Now I know this is unscientific, and I should have taken shots at a variety of apertures and so on but my bus was due so please take this as a bit of fun and not a real scientific test. I was curious to see how a £460 lens (the DA*) compared to a £40 lens (the Tamron) and a £60 something lens (the K).

All the images were uploaded as RAW files to Lightroom. The DA* and the Tamron both had a white balance of 5100/-8 but the K had 4250/+14. Changing the K to the same as the other two lenses improved the look of the image a great deal, as you can see below. I don't know why auto WB on the K10D was so different from the other two lenses and could explain why I haven't always been happy with the results from the K.

The only other edit was to up the sharpening a little bit, and to produce the so-called "100% crops". All images were converted to jpgs using Lightoom's export function, for the full-size images reducing to 800 pixels on the long edge, for the crops at full size.

Comparing sharpness is a bit of a problem here as (a) they are handheld and (b) the first two lenses are AF, the last manual, although all should have been on infinity.

The images were then posted to flickr for inclusion here, and the full-size images used so that should mean no flickr-induced problems (I hope).

As I say, this is all bad science, but interesting nevertheless. Personally, I feel the K f/2.5 comes out of this with flying colours although why the K10D messes up the white balance is a mystery to me.

Best wishes, Kris.

DA* 50-135mm @ 135mm, full image:



so-called 100% crop:



Tamron 70-300mm @ 133mm, full image:



so-called 100% crop



SMC "K" 135mm, f/2.5 @ f/8, full image, white balance as for other photos:



SMC "K" 135mm, f/2.5 @ f/8, full image, white balance as set by K10D:



As penultimate image, 100% crop:

But the K is a prime.

... and a rather lovely one if heavy. No idea why the auto-white balance was quite so different though and makes me realise I'll need to be more proactive with WB when using that lens. Shame I didn't have my SMC Takumar 135mm with me too.

Very odd! I have used K and M primes from 20mm up to 300mm and white balance has been no different to the DA zooms or even the Kit Lenses so i`m baffled by your results. If the Framing were different (say showing less sky) or the lighting had changed between shots then i could understand it but that certainly is not the case here!

Best Regards - Pete