The two A series 28-80mm lenses side by side

On the left is a bog standard Pentax-A zoom 28-80mm such as was found on thousands of P30 cameras back in the day. It's OK but that's about it.

On the right is an SMC Pentax-A zoom 28-80mm. Seen alone one can easily confuse the two. Seen together they are clearly different - and so are the results you get from it. It is vanishingly rare as not many were made and people hang on to them.




You do see lots of ads on Ebay stating "SMC" in front of the engraved name since it is what usually does appear there but a look at their photographs instantly show that they are the common version, so do look first !

The first one has the design traits of the Takumar Bayonet series, more green fill engraving and vertical stripe design for the rubbers. But can clearly see it's branded Pentax... confusing old world some of the transition periods in lens body design.

I did own the Pentax-A variant about 30 years ago, found it ok. You can still see copies with Takumar-A branding too.

I'd like to track down the SMC version however to use with my P50, the D-FA zooms are quite hefty on the small film body

So the slimmer one on the right is much better? I hadn't realised there were any ~28-80mm kit zooms form the 80s or 90s that are any good apart from the F 35-70mm. I had one of the ones on the left - image quality was rubbish and I couldn't give it away so eventually it went to a charity shop.