Yes!

I was so impressed with my Nokton (which is one of those "prise from my cold dead hands" lenses) that I bought the Ultron more recently. First impressions of the latter are equally good, but my camera had to go to the hospital for urgent attention before I had a chance to give it a real whirl. It comes with a nice close up lens included, which is quite useful too.

The Nokton, at 58mm, is an almost perfect 85mm equivalent on APSC sensors, and produces nice sharp images with great colour, contrast and bokeh. For those of a DPR "Festus" persuasion, I encouraged "Rupert" to buy one recently, and he also loves it (look at the WSSA Pentaxian Flickr site). Build quality is excellent - easily up there with the Limiteds. Only irritant is that you have to pay extra for a lens hood.

I prefer the Utron to the 40 DA Ltd, mainly because I prefer the handling of a slightly larger lens (it is still a pancake design though) and it is a little faster. I suspect that there is not much to choose between the two of them in terms of image quality and many people would buy the Pentax in part to get AF. The Voigtlander is a FF design though, so a good choice if you still have any film bodies or want to wait for a FF K mount dSLR.......

A lens on my "maybe one day" list is the Color-Skopar 20mm, which also looks good - a FF, faster and wider alternative to the DA21Ltd. Has anyone tried one of those?

To change topic slightly - congratulations on going on safari: you are going to love it! The equipment you need will depend upon the country you are going to, but I'd suggest looking in the archives of the Luminous Landscape website for some interesting articles on what gear to take.

I went to Botswana with K20D, grip, 55-300, Tamron 500 and a few fast primes. My reflections from that experience:

The 55-300 was good in terms of IQ but too slow to focus at longer lengths. I missed shots as a result.

300 is not long enough, especially if you are interested in birds as well as mammals

I used the 500mm Tamron way more than I expected to (I was almost going to go without it, but very glad I didn't). Field of view won't be much different between my Tamron and your proposed Sigma/TC combo, so I think that should be enough

The best safari photography will be at the start and end of the day, so taking a combination of a body that does well at higher ISOs plus fast lenses makes the most sense. There were occasions where the only lens I could use was Voigtlander Nokton - and even then I was close to wide open (f1.4) at ISO2000

One other option could be the 60-250 plus 2X TC or 1.7X TC - but it's an expensive choice. You could of course sell when you get back, and consider the difference between buying and selling as a rental charge for your trip....

Grip and spare batteries are essential

I found that a lightweight Manfrotto Modo monopod was really useful (with SR left on). Great in the Land Rovers and better for me than beanbags (I'm 6'3" so I'm too tall for beanbags in open cars)

Consider taking some kind of device to back up your SD cards each day

Take a decent pair of binoculars - it's good to put the camera down and simply soak up the experience every now and again too!

Look forward to seeing your photos.

Jon

And who is going to own up to buying the 31Ltd from Ffordes? I know it wasn't me... Mike?.......

The lens is sold and moving to the continent where it hopes to be used to photograph better food and wine, and benefit from less rubbish weather than we have here! Thanks for looking, Jon

Actually one advantage of the K-7 (or at least my K-7) is that it does appear to meter better than previous Pentax dSLRs with the legacy lenses. I find that I rarely need to dial in compensation now, unless you would expect to with any lens.

I think the issue is partly to do with the focussing screen in the earlier bodies,and people found that by replacing it with an earlier screen from the original istD bodies, the metering improved considerably. I never tried this but perhaps others who did could comment?

This great lens is still available and I am open to sensible offers (very) close to the asking price.

Cheers,

Jon

Reply sent...

I could also loan a lens or two - eg 28mm SMCA, 50mm SMCM

Hope all works out OK.

Jon

Excellent lens for sale - unfortunately I've been bitten by the Limited bug, and can't justify buying new lenses that overlap focal lengths of what I already have, so time to see if anyone is interested in this super sharp fast prime that's a great standard length on APS C cameras.

I've owned the lens since new (it's about two years old) and it will come boxed, with hood, caps, nice Pentax pouch (will miss that!) plus the original plastic bags and silica gel!

The lens itself is in superb condition - pretty much unmarked. The hood shows some light signs of use (the photo below was taken is harsh light and makes it look worse than it really is).

You can still find these new if you try hard (the cheapest I could find was a little over £300), and if you read the review on Photozone you'll see that it's a fine piece of glass - a great way to supplement consumer zooms with something small, sharp and bright.

I'm asking £220 including insured P&P within the UK. I will ship to the EU but would need to check cost of postage before confirming price - and would also prefer PayPal for EU sales (will therefore also need to charge the PayPal commission).

Please PM if you are interested.

Jon

I agree. In addition, I find it's easier to get great higher ISO images from the K-7 starting with RAW files, and exposing to the right. WIth many cameras, care with exposure can make an enormous difference to how bad the noise is at higher ISO.

I'm not surprised that the K-7 did not improve on the noise of the K20D - given it now has 4 channel output to handle video. However, one improvement I've noticed with the K-7 is that I don't get as much purple fringing. The K20D was a little bit prone to this (it's a sensor issue as well as a lens issue) to the extent that I was getting it even with a Tamron mirror lens - which is pretty much immune to purple fringing. That problem has gone with the K-7.