New Lens for Pentax from COSINA

Newlink wide(20mm)lens for Pentax see link.

It amazes me when looking round other forums how many photographers (mainly Canon and Nikon users) will not touch any lens that is not autofocus. I can understand the older generation wanting af because of failing eyesight etc (soon to be me the way mine are going) but the younger ones will not even entertain the idea.

Tell you the truth, I mainly use manual focus as I hate it when the auto-focus takes time to "lock on" to a object specially if the object is small and in between leaves.

Unless this is just me of course.

I have lost many a good shot because of this problem.

Younger photographers won't understand going back in time as it were to manual focus. Everything has got to be auto.

I bet there aren't many people that turn auto off completely on the DSLR's. I always think that the only way to learn how to use your camera properly is to turn it to manual. Manual focus, metering, exposure, etc.

This is how it was taught old school and it's the way I know. I sometimes look at these new cameras as a way of cheating. People stick them on auto everything and say they know how to use a camera, but shove an old camera in front of them where you have to do everything yourself, then they are lost.


Rant over


Paul

True... though I do have my AF set to only focus "on demand". You can program the custom options of all Pentax dSLRs to not focus on half-press of the shutter. You can then point at something contrasty / pre-focus using either the dedicated AF button on the back, or the OK button (on models that don't have the AF button).

I rarely miss anything because of focus issues And it also means you can manually focus with the DA lenses that have quick-shift focussing (e.g. the DA*50-135 is a dream to manually focus!)

Matt

At £477.25 including the hood, the Color Skopar makes the DA 21 look positively cheap at £349, the advantage being that the Color Skopar will probably cover FF film or digital as they say it has a 94 deg angle of view (which is a FF FOV).

The DA 21 vignettes slightly on FF film and has some barrel distortion, it even shows up on APS-C.

I suspect that in common with other Voigtlander/Cosina lenses, the IQ should be very good.

Does anybody know about the pentax lenses that were on the roadmap???
The DA*30mm for example was on my wanting list, it isn't on the roadmap but heared they will come at a later date... any news about that?

About the manual operation, it really depends on what kind of shooting it is. Sometimes I don't have the time to borther about the exposure and is it more important getting the shot then have it exposed porperly. Still most of the time M is the most I use but only if it doesn't take too much time to get the settings right.

The way Mat has the AF setuped works really well, it needs some getting used to but when you see it doesn't focus while pressing the shutter release you lean it fast. It's mighty handy also with macro lenses, I used it to bring the focus at macro or at normal shoting, it can do it faster then me trun it.

For interest, there is a test of the Voigtlander lens on Nikon body in this week's British Journal of Photography - it comes out well.

Err!!! Is this an echo of the first post in this thread?

shim

The only downside to this setup that I have encountered is that when you press the shutter release button to take a picture the SR system has not had enough time to stabilise because SR is linked to half-press as well.

It still takes the same amount of time no matter if the AF is under that button or not.

I most of the time have it half press when focusing the shot so that's enough time for the SR to work correctly, simply something you need to learn yourself.

"It amazes me when looking round other forums how many photographers (mainly Canon and Nikon users) will not touch any lens that is not autofocus"

I do not get how you can think this...if this were true, then why are 1000's and 1000's of lens adaptors for mf lenses being sold?

The amount of Canon EOS users using Contax/OM and other older manual focus lenses is quite staggering.

Tells something about their believe in the quality from Canons own lenses, doesn't it ?

But....,if you have Pentax quality glass and want to go FF, a Canon Eos 5D with purpose made adapter is the way to do it.

In fairness, there are no Canon EOS fit MF lenses since Canon swapped mounts to go AF, and you can't make a non-optical adaptor to fit Canon FD glass to a Canon EOS camera because of the registration distance. Even if Canon and Pentax MF era lenses were identical in every way but the mount, the Pentax would be the better choice for mounting on an EOS camera.

"In fairness, there are no Canon EOS fit MF lenses since Canon swapped mounts to go AF"

...not so...but there are not many. The Voigtlander SL range of lenses had at least one lens (the 125mm macro) in EOS mount. Also, Zeiss recently started making their ZF/ZS/ZK lenses in EOS mount, called the ZE lenses. So far, the 50/1.4 & 85/1.4 are available.

The whole mf adaptor craze started about 3-4 years ago in Japan with full frame EOS users prefering to use the Contax wide angle lenses on their FF EOS's as the EOS wides are not so good.

my wording was unintentionally ambiguous, there are no EOS fit MF lenses made by Canon, or at least only a very few very specialised ones. The point I was making is that even a die hard Canon fan who wanted to use MF lenses on a Canon body would be obliged to either use non-Canon lenses or accept an optical adaptor in order to do it.