Which lens to buy?

Hello all,
I am a relative newbie just trying to learn to take some good pictures, mostly of my family. For Christmas I was lucky enough to get a Pentax *istD. One of the deciding factors in choosing which digital to buy was the fact that I already owned the Pentax MZ7, with a Tamron 28-200 lens and the dedicated flash. I knew that the digital would increase the lens by 1.5 times, but I hoped I wouldn't notice the difference too much. Wrong. Seems like every time I try to take pictures I am frustrated because I can no longer get close enough. I would like to buy a new lens, but I am unsure of what to do. When I have tried out the 19-35 lens, there is such a small range, it makes me think that I would be inclined to want to be switching lenses every few pictures. Also, with the Nikon 70-D coming out with the 18-70 lens, I was thinking if I wait 6 months Tamron would probably duplicate that lens for my camera. The biggest wrinkle to this is that if possible, I don't want to wait for a new lens to maybe come out because in 11 days we are going to Disneyworld and I really don't want to be frustrated at not being able to get the shots I want. I am beginning to be sorry I didn't wait for the 70-D to come out. Can anyone give me some advice? Thanks so much for any information you are able to provide. Christine

Hi Christine,

Well, Pentax have a 16-45mm - but about £320 it might dent your pocket!
There is also a digital Sigma 18-50mm for £90. That should give you a reasonable range. If you have money to burn there's the Sigma 12-24mm which is seriously wide angle, for £520!

Personally, I use a Tokina 24-200mm generally, and a 20-35mm for wider angle on the *istD. Yes, it's a pain about the angle of view

The Sigma might be worth looking at - it'll give you 27mm-75mm which is quite useable. And of course, if you can get down to Park Cameras, you can always try the lenses out

Unfortunately you can't easily get a wide range zoom that goes much below 28mm (my Tokina is a really hefty lense with 72mm filters - quality is very good). It's all something of a compromise. I think Pentax are bringing out a wider range zoom, and I'm sure that Sigma will do the same, given time

For static panoramas you could take several shots and glue them together later in Photoshop (or other shareware tools that specifically do panoramas).

Oh yes, and make sure you've got enough card storage space, or get something like the Apacer Steno CP100, or Addonics Multi Function Recorder/MFR - both burn your card to a CD so you can take a pile of CD-Rs and burn away on holiday

Hope that helps!
Matt

Thanks Matt, I had checked out the Tamrons, but not the Sigmas. The Pentax lens sounds just what I need, but a little too pricey for me. I think I remember from other posts that Park Cameras is in the U.K.?? I live in Canada so it is slightly far, but I will hit a camera store next time I go to town. Also good info about the burner. I was thinking that I would buy a second card, but not a burner because apparently you can download your photos at their camera shops and burn a CD. Worth thinking about, though. Can I ask one more question? How is the quality of the Sigmas? I was under the impression that the quality was not as good as the Tamron etc. Thanks again for the information. Christine

Hi Christine.

Just a note about getting pix burnt to CD at photo processing shops...

I'm no expert and not sure if the service you mentioned is the same as the one you came across, but as a word of warning anyway from my experience of trying to do the same.

A couple of years ago I had a great holiday in the Alps and shot far more pictures than I thought, filling up all 4 of my 128mb cards (only a 4mp camera) with 3 days still to go. So I tried the local Fuji outfit in Chamonix, and asked them to burn them to CD for me.

I explained several times, that I didn't want any sort of processing on the files, just a straight copy. Came back in an hour and they were still going through the PC, which was bizarre. An hour later they'd only just finished.

Suspicious, when I got back to my lodgings I asked the manager if I could double check my new cd on his pc (no burner!) which I did, and the filesizes were miniscule, totally resized and much reduced in quality.

And to think I was THIS CLOSE [holds up finger & thumb close together] to reformatting the card before checking. I would've been livid.

So my alternative was to go through and weed out the chaff, create some more space and shoto at a lower quality for the rest of the hols.

Enjoy your trip!

Thank you so much for that story. I have waited for many years to go to on this trip and I do want to come home with good photos. I will for sure check out my own burner/recorder (or whatever they are called).

On the subject of storing files when on holiday, we have opted for the Photainer (aka Flashtrax) which is a portable hard drive of 20, 40 or 80 GB into which you just plug your CF card and press the "download" button. Easy as pie. You can check and review the pictures on the inbuilt screen. The cost is now more reasonable and it seems a very sttractive choice!

To which you might have added that it happily displays Pentax RAW files but not TIFs

Who needs TIF's on the *istD? They are even bigger than the RAW files and you can't do the same post-processing.

Why do you think Pentax designed in the feature if it is so totally useless?

I didn't say it was totally useless. There might be people who don't want to go through the conversion from RAW to TIFF themselves but don't want to loose anything by JPEG compression. However, the TIFF feature would have been more useful if they had put in a lossless compression like LZW.
If you don't mind doing the conversion than TIFF has no advantage over RAW and with RAW you have the comfort of doing further adjustment without any loss. With TIFF you loose that freedom AND the pictures take more space on your card or drive in the camera.