No way, no how It's one of my favourite lenses and I would never be without it. It's definitely the sharpest lens I've ever owned and invaluable for macro's.

You know what it is - mid-life crisis, hitting 40. The OH would rather I spent the money on this than a motorbike or a sports car, etc. She did make me sell the bigma and 400mm to fund the 300mm. Still can't believe she let me buy the 500mm, though

We made it through the bubble bursting on the internet and kept some money aside for fun stuff. I've been told that this is it for the next 5 years, though.

Yeah.

Right

It's only a slight crop and squared off at the sides. It was probably 1.5m away.

I bought it with the intention of using it and the DA70mm Ltd as my walkaround lenses. I've got tired of zooms for now. It weighs about the same as my Sigma 180mm f/3.5 1:1 Macro, so I'll be sticking it on a monopod. The pictures today were hand-held and my hand is a little achy from gripping it.

I've got more shots, but that's all I've had time to process so far.

First time out with this new lens. Some shots walking around the local park. I'm particularly impressed with:

1. PF is very well under control at F4, there is some in extreme conditions but it seems to disappear after F4.5. Nothing like the higher PF levels that I've seen from the DA* 200mm from examples of others (I don't have that one)
2. No sign of vignetting
3. Lovely and quiet
4. Lovely and quick to focus
5. Close focus of 1.4m is very handy
6. Very light

Testing close focus:


f/5.6 1/250 ISO100

Testing for PF and vignetting (although this is at f5.6, I didn't see any vignetting at f/4):


f/5.6 1/1500 ISO100

Testing DOF at f4:


f/4 1/750 ISO100

100% crop test:

I don't have any quality shots, but you could try searching flickr for K20D:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=K20D&w=all

These are my feeble K20D offerings:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=k20d&w=9000862%40N07

The alternative is to keep the hood on the lens and let that take any knocks and not risk a splintering filter scratch the front element if it breaks or becomes dislodged.

It could be done to the extent they achieved auto-focus for manual lenses with the AF 1.7x converter. That is, you rough focus your lens manually and the converter fine focuses using an SDM motor moving an element in the converter.

It would be fantastic to have a modern SDM equivalent of the 1.7 AF converter, but I'd guess the money will be on a standard converter with SDM pass-through.

I got one too at the same time from SRS along with a 70mm DA Limited. The 300mm f4 looks like a lovely lens from the indoor quick tests that I've done, but like mille19, the weather here hasn't been conducive to any outdoor shots.

I also tried it with the Kenko 1.5x converter and SDM still works well, though I do wonder how the SR will cope as I've not had much luck with IQ with using various TC's with any lens I have.

I'm still waiting to see what the mysterious "Rear Converter for SDM" actually is on the Pentax roadmap.

I'm of the opinion that I don't want to trust my photos to a no-name brand for the sake of a few pounds. OK, any card can have problems, but the SanDisks have a good reputation and I'm currently using the SanDisk 4GB SDHC cards without issue.

I had the GX10 and now have the K20D. For the photography that I like to do (Macro and Wildlife) I much prefer the K20D. There are a few reasons:

1. The larger sensor makes a big difference to me as with wildlife shots I often need to crop the image to get additional magnification

2. The noise you get in shadow at higher ISO's is very nice compared to the K10D. It's much more grainy and is very very easy to clean up with some NR in PP. The K10D tended to look blurry when using NR compared to how the K20D looks. Again this helps me in low light situations where I need a fast speed and so need to use higher ISO.

I'm not sure whether there's any real AF difference between the two, though I do tend to get better AF accuracy that I did with the GX10 (less FF or BF issues that I seemed to get in the past).

Weight and size-wise they're basically the same, with larger battery and SD card compartment opening levers.

The downside of the K20D - very large RAW files - had to move to 4GB SDHC SanDisk Extreme III cards to cope