zoom

hello all im intersted in getting a longer focal lenght lens i have been looking at the tammy 75-300mm macro i asked on here yesterday about the sigma 400mm but someone said its not great purple fringing etc and maybe the pentax 55-300mm good option any advice please
oh yes im on bit of budget but obviously dont want a crap lens so willing to delay to get extra money if need be
thankyou

The Tamron 70-300 is a respected lens on the forum, since a lot of members had them offered instead of a Pentax 50-200. The offending store was Jessops and most members tried them and liked them.

I have one I use regularly with good results.

Hi Emma,
All the shots below where taken with a Tammy 70-300 macro, Yes it`s not as good as a DA*300, but then it cost a hell of a lot less.












Davex.

thankyou for advice images are great dave defo think i will go for the tammy now maybe put an ad in classified

You can get one delivered free from SRS for £119, just tell them you're a forum member and you're user name.

Hi Emma, Davex,

Please don't take this the wrong way, but Davex's photos are not really demonstrating the qualities of the lens and should not be used in order to make a purchasing decision one way or the other.

Personally, if I just took these images at face value, they would not encourage me to buy this lens. So I nipped over to Davex's flickr site to look at the EXIF data.


The problem is that all the images seem to show a bit of blur due to camera movement and quite possibly a bit of a back focusing issue.
Davex, were you using a tripod or the shake reduction? I would suggest that, whatever happened, 1/180s at 300mm, for example, was not sufficient to prevent blur.

Were you using autofocus? I would suggest that you test your lens (search the web for 'back focus') and use the K20D's adjustment feature to correct any problem. I have recently tested all my lenses, since buying a few with wide max apertures, and all required some adjustment. Back focusing will not show up too much with apertures like f/5.6 at short focal lengths, but it certainly will at 300mm.

The other possibility, in the case of the butterflies, is that you were a bit closer than the minimum focus distance of the lens.

I've not tried the Tamron 70-300, but I do have the Pentax DA50-200, DA*200 and DA*300. Obviously, the DA* lenses are superb, but a large part of the additional cost over the DA50-200 is in the larger max aperture and in the SDM in-lens focusing. I would say that the DA50-200 has a good measure of the excellent colour and contrast rendering abilities of the DA*s. In fact, I have found all my Pentax lenses to have these qualities, even the kit DA18-55 (although perhaps the least for this one).

Looking at the images, I would think that the Tammy does not compare favourably on colour/contrast, but obviosuly the conditions at the time of shooting are unknown to me and I have not compared the lens with a DA50-200.

Can anybody offer an opinion on the Pentax 55-300 ?




Sorry Davex - you have obviously chosen good subjects and thought about the framing. I didn't want to launch into an unsolicited criticism of your photos - I just wanted to make sure that Emma and other readers understand what they are looking at.


There are many posts on this and other forums where people question whether a lens is sharp, have they got a duff copy, others saying this lens is sharper than that lens and all that. Then when people post pictures, the reason for lack of sharpness usually turns out to be too slow a shutter for the focal length. I'm as guilty as the next man of trying to push the shutter speed in favour of lower ISO, it's just that we shouldn't be suprised when we don't get away with it!


Hope this is of help,

Derek.

PS Check out www.dofmaster.com, you will see how crucial focusing is at 300mm

Derek,what I was trying to illustrate was that for £100 you can get a decent zoom.

All of the shots on this post were taken handheld with AF. I have tested the focus and it is bang on. The bit of info which you do not have is that due to a dissability i can only use 1 arm, so any blurr tends to down to me, this has two effects; camera shake, and particularly with a zoom, body movement after the AF has locked. i think i probably lose about 3 stops with the Tammy on

I have no probablem with any criticism of my shots Derek, as long as it is constructive, or meant well. Your`s was.

Davex.

Sorry to hear that Davex. When shooting handheld, it's a contant battle between depth-of-field, motion blur and noise - losing three stops can't make it any easier!

I noticed you shot in DNG - which converter are you using?

There are just so many contributing factors to how an image appears when it is posted on the web, it's hard to determine which characteristics of the images are down to the lens.

Derek.

Elements 6, am still learning technique, the K20 is my first DSLR. Things are starting to improve, it probably just takes me longer, i realy should get a monopod but then it`s just something else to carry around.

Davex.

I bought the budget version of Capture One (before Silky Pix was available). I found, to my taste, it produced more pleasing colour/contrast than the Adobe converter, although from what I remember, with the default settings, the Adobe images were a bit sharper. I was also quite surprised at how the overall tone and tint could vary between converters, which must be down to how they act upon the colour temperature and white balance information.

So this could explain why I think the images are a bit lacking in this area - it might be the raw converter rather than the lens.

I also just noticed that you converted to AdobeRGB rather than sRGB - I seem to remember that, when you view an AdobeRGB profiled image through a non-profile-aware viewer, the colours will appear dull.

Just thought I'd point that out, in case my comments put someone off what I'm sure is, as you pointed out, a decent zoom for £100.

Derek.

PS Emma, sorry to hijack your thread with technical points, it just shows how hard it is to offer a truely accurate assessment of any lens. When someone posts a picture and says "this was taken with that lens", not much of what you see is down to the lens, even though all of the light that made the image came through the lens!

thats ok its good to no the full story