Comments made by Lance B - Page 9

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A lovely shot indeed! Nicely post processed.

Comment by Lance B posted on Me an my little boy at 31/10/2009 - 01:39

Anvh wrote:
Very pretty Lance I love how soft it is wide open, just super.

Thanks, Stefan.

The A50mm f1.2 is a supe lens and is great for those "special effects" of narrow DOF. It is beautifully made, as are all the A lenses, and wondeful to use.

Comment by Lance B posted on Ultra fast 50. at 31/10/2009 - 01:35

Here are a few at from the A50mm @ f1.2:

It starts to look great at f2:

Comment by Lance B posted on Ultra fast 50. at 28/10/2009 - 22:34

Clarky wrote:
Great shots Lance, I had some pics I was going to post but your flower shots have put mine to shame The second shot looks almost 3D like.

Thyank you very much, Clarky.

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Its one of those lenses you can just stick in your pocket and away you go.

Better still, put it on your camera and it works much better.

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I took some shots with mine yesterday, wide open, they are still in the camera and I haven't got around to inspecting them yet, But from what I can tell its better when stopped down to 5.6, snaps into focus very fast.

Looking forward to your results.

Comment by Lance B posted on DA15 f/4 review at 28/10/2009 - 22:29

Shaky wrote:

Mongoose wrote:
In all probability someone will buy the remains of the company to get the rights to the K mount.

I am afraid that one of the key problems facing Pentax/Hoya and any potential acquiror/strategic partner is that the K mount backwards is a huge liability.

If you are selling dslr bodies, you also want to be selling the punters brand spanking new lenses at what must be hefty markups given these are basically pieces of glass stuck together in a plastic/metal case.

You certainly don't want them digging out and god forbid using 30-50 year old bits of glass the profit on which is long gone.

The magnitude of the industry "cross-subsidy" from lens sales on the total dslr operations is impossible to quantify given the limited accounting information the players release. However, even disregarding the issue of old k mount lens stocks cannibalising 'current' sales, this is undoubtedly a further reason why Pentax's tiny market share is such a serious business problem.

Selling new lenses, rather than allowing the use of legacy lenses, is fine if you are coming from a position of strength. Pentax is not. They need the backward compatibility in order to entice people, who have legacy lenses, to purchase a Pentax digital SLR rather than go to the big two. How many people here would have bothered buying into Pentax if they could no longer use legacy lenses? A hell of a lot less than would have if they couldn't.

It is these stalwarts that rekindled the Pentax brand back in 2003/04 that got Pentax back off the ground otherwise they would have faded away. This has then led to Pentax being able to grow enough so as to get off the ground and then start producing a new lens range which has been very successful (in terms of Pentax sales).

As for your assertion that backward compatability is a liability, I am afraid that I just cannot agree. It has not cannibalised sales, because Pentax would never in a million years have been able to set up a new lens system and manufactured them for a new mount at the time of the *ist D, DS, DL. They were hard pressed even making the lenses they did design for digital let alone a complete new range and they have only just managed to get a reasonable lens inventory and line-up on sale now. So, imagine how left short they would have been if they tried to introduce a new lens line? They would have had little money to fund such a venture and they would have probably cut corners and produced an inferior product and we don't need another inferior product as there are two other's already.

If Pentax did not use backward compatible lenses, then I am afraid that Pentax would have folded years ago.

Comment by Lance B posted on Hoya CEO: "We will not shut down this business.” at 28/10/2009 - 05:10

johnriley wrote:
The essentials are that you sell what you manufacture, at a profit. The size of the company isn't a direct factor in that, so provided Pentax grow at a rate that they can sustain then all will be well.

These are wise words indeed. I run a business and what you say here is the nub of the matter.

Comment by Lance B posted on Hoya CEO: "We will not shut down this business.” at 28/10/2009 - 04:57

The DA15 is superb fopr contrast and sharpness. Purple fringing (? do you mean CA?) is kept to a minimum but can easily be removed in post process. CA is much lower than for the DA12-24 and it also has little distortion for a WA of this magnitude. All in all a superb lens:

You can see a full gallery here:

http://www.pbase.com/lance_b/da15

Here are some samples, but they look much better in their larger state on my gallery above.