FA 28-200mm IF-AL Lens

Hi,

Does any of you have any experience of this lens. Any comments, good or bad, would be appreciated.

Pete.

The wider the zoom ratio of a lens, the more difficult it is to make and the chances are that the quality will be lower as well. This particular design is not at all bad, but the caveat is "for its zoom range" and it will not be up to the standard of more modest zooms or primes.

Having said that, it would be undeniably convenient and would probably produce excellent 7" x 5" prints.

Hi Pete,
I haven't used it my self and I don't think I would consider buying one. A Zoom with such a range is always going to be a compromise and will trade off quality for functionality. There are quite a lot of comments on Stan's site here http://stans-photography.info/ It does seem to come for quite a lot of praise in that it performs better than expected for such a lens but the underlying thought is that shorter range zooms/primes will give better picture quality.

Personally I would prefer to carry a combination such as the 24-90 and a 70-200 and accept the inconvenience for the sake of better quality.

Kim

I got mine from EvilBay a few weeks ago. I've only put one film past it so far, but the results (in 7x5 prints) were more than acceptable. As has been said, it's a compromise lens but it's not that much of a compromise and I've not noticed any severe quality reduction

I routinely sell 16x20 inch and larger images from mine. here's my opinion:
28-135 absolutely pro quality some barrel dist at 28mm pincusion noticable at 200mm. sharpnes noticably lower at 200mm (always stop it down a couple stops from wide apetures)
if you shoot 800 iso film, you'll find no noticable difference at 200mm between this lens and a more expensive lens. iso 100 film will lose some sharpness. great lens for portraits and weddings and travel.

Thanks to all for your comments, much appreciated.

I wrote a review of this lens for photo.net a few years back. You can see it at http://photo.net/equipment/pentax/smc28-200

That sounds pretty much what I expected - it's certainly never been a lens on my Wants List....

Would somebody get rid of these spam posts? I hope this isn't a new trend in spamming, it'll make forums virtually useless.

I suggest a forum rule agreemnt that specifies monetary damages for posting such crap. Once or twice is funny, three times is just stupid!

That's one I missed, but I just zapped it. It's been dealt with now, so there shouldn't be any more. I'm really glad about that as well - it takes a long time to delete all that nonsense. (Although some of it is potentially dangerous nonsense)