Sold to rickyfitts

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Pentax FA 50mm F1.4 for sale, in excellent condition. Includes original box and paperwork (manual, serial num sheet, etc), and both lens caps.

It's a great lens, but I prefer the focal length of my Sigma 30mm 1.4, so this one has to go.

It's about two years old and I've had it from new.

Prefered payment is bank transfer, but could also do Paypal gift. UK delivery only.

Pricing is difficult, as there don't seem to be many for sale in the usual places, but I'll start at £220, including RMSD.

I've bought and sold a couple of things through the forum without problems, but I can PM my ebay account details if anyone is interested (60 feedback, 100% positive)

I see exactly the same with my FA 50mm (on a K20D). Focus is fine in daylight, but needs -10 indoors for tungsten. It's a pain.

Sold.

Couple of images of the camera:

Well after some more tests it seems that I get quite different AF behaviour depending on the lighting. In daylight my FA 50mm 1.4 needs to be at factory defaults. For tungsten lighting it needs to be at -10. I couldn't quite believe it was lighting, so I tried varying all other parameters I could think of, e.g. turning off and on shake reduction, but the only thing that affects it is the lighting.

A google search threw up this comment on another forum:

"Don't shoot test targets under Tungsten light if you want to fine-tune AF for daylight shooting. Tungsten light will cause the AF system to slightly front focus. This holds for every Pentax DSLR before the K-7."

I'm somewhat relieved that this seems to be a known issue, i.e. it's not a problem specific to my camera, but I'm frustrated that I'm now going to have to tweak my focus adjustments depending on the light. How tedious.

Yes that's the basic idea, though the scales aren't the same, so the numbers aren't quite as simple as this. So setting the debug global to -90 might be equivalent to -10 on the standard scale, meaning that the new standard range would be -20 to 0.

Unfortunately when I went to confirm this behaviour this morning, I found that the focus on my FA 50mm 1.4 was wrong again. So I reset everything back to defaults, in the debug menu and the standard menu, and now it's focussing correctly at the defaults. This doesn't make any sense to me. I'll need to do a bunch more tests to work out what's going on.

I've written up the intructions for the K20D here:

http://www.andymcm.com/blog/2010/01/debug-mode-on-pentax-k20d-dslr.html

Just tried it, and although this way looks a little more scary initially, it's more convenient because you just write the file to the SD card once, then you can easily switch the debug mode on and off through the camera. (The way I was doing it required the file to be changed to switch debug on and off)

The K20D details are slightly different than the Kx - I'll write it up and post a link.