Here at last! - DA* 60-250

And bonus, same stuff with DA 55-300 for comparison.

f/5.6 crop



f/8.0 crop

So is the 60-250mm worth 4 times the price for weather sealing and HSM .. personally from the look of those I would say not.
Besides, my 55-300mm sits nicely in my bag along with the 12-24mm, DA* 16-50mm and Tamron macro.

If you focus on the sign and take images at various apertures the sharpness of the wall behind will vary because the depth of field will change.

, I do realise that John, I was talking series of photos at the same aperture.
Just did a test with focus chart and... 250mm, f/4.0 defocusing manually in one direction, getting focus via AF, defocusing manually in other direction, back in focus with AF, and one shot shows front focus, other back focus, or maybe it is K10D... (and K20D nearly 4 weeks with pentax and still no news).

Repeated focus chart test few times and conclusion is, with 60-250 if first defocused lens towards the infinity, it has the tendency to back focussing, if defocussed first towards the min focussing distance, then it shows front focus. It still could be the K10D (or firmware 1.3) way of dealing with SDM, tried same test with 55-300 and it doesn't show that issue.

If that were the case everyone with a K10D and DA*16-50mm up to DA* 300mm would be screaming blue murder (me included).

Not long got back from SRS... the good news is that it was a rouge sample.

The one that SRS replaced it with is much much better at f/4....
Now I'm a happy bunny

Thanks again to the guys at SRS

Glad you got it sorted, good to meet you.

What is a "rouge sample":

Would guess its meant to be rogue

Heard of grey imports, but never rouge ones

Black..... Silver..... and now Rouge

shim

Hope you made sure they didnt give you the duff one to take back to Spain

You lot are terrible, very pithy!

Hi folks, well I picked mine up this afternoon from you know where. I'll post some pics here for you to pick over in due time.

I have an F70-210 and a DA200 too so hopefully I'll find time to do some comparisons soon.

I'll try and post a few pics from the pre-production sample too, but probably in a seperate thread to avoid confusion.

hope everyone enjoys their new lens.

my mrs is suggesting I should be sentenced to some hard time helping round the house for buying this one, so I hope it's worth it

cheers

Problem with 55-300 is that it is loosing sharpness towards the edges quite significantly, of course using f/8.0 - f/11.0 helps (but doesn't nivelate) on the cost of slower shutter. 60-250 is much more consistent (not a surprise anyway for this price).
SDM not HSM, Pentax still doesn't do HSM.

Small, bit compressed example pic taken with 60-250:
https://www.pentaxuser.com/photo/Approach-6177