Hello and welcome

Thank you all again. Now I have to gather enough money - probably I'll go for D-FA unless I find some bargain F or FA.

The scary thing is it seems I'm getting the LBA symptoms... gollum, gollum

Thank you very much - I knew I could count on your knowledge and experience. Going a bit further, if you compare F / FA / DA by their quality - how do they perform? Is DA any worse or better than F or FA, especially at aperture opened wide (so 2.8 - 4). How sharp they are? What about purple fringing? (I noticed it is pretty bad on my A 50mm 1.4 - but this is for another post). Which would you choose for school plays (low light)? As I understand they all perform very well in macro mode?

As you said, F/FA won't be much cheaper than DA and they are heavier, so as Stefan suggested maybe DA is the obvious way to go then?

I plan to buy a fast 100mm macro lens, maybe not yet (need some money), but started looking already - maybe I'll find a bargain?

My favourite one is DA 100mm - I never thought about it before, but AF with QuickShift is sooooo gooood... I appreciated the feature once I tried Tamron 70-300mm which is not bad, but... Pentax seems to be much more comfortable for me.

Back to the topic - one of the things I like about DA series is that the focusing ring can be adjusted manually no mater if I'm in AF or in manual mode.

While considering -A lenses which apparently are high quality - I can live with manual focusing - I'd prefer having AF. The man reason for that is that I'd use the lens on school plays, and possibly my wife would - and she is not that happy with manual focusing. I thought about F 100mm f/2.8 macro. I hope this is cheaper than DA. But can I focus manually in AF mode? (I know, I can switch, but...) How about the quality? Any other important differences between F and DA?

The same - I have that set and I really like it. There I explained why I prefer Pentax-DA 55-300mm over Tamron 70-300 Macro.

Perhaps I'd prefer DA 17-70mm over the DA 16-45mm (haven't tried it though) - but it is a bit more expensive and I cannot afford it now. And having 16-45mm I'll buy some 100mm macro first.

Hello and welcome

Hello and welcome

Mike, while it's difficult to say anything about your focusing speed, but the accuracy / sharpness is certainly unharmed (well, at least looking at the pictures you shared with us )

Thanks for the info. Once more, fantastic pictures

I never seen EN live, but seen few clips. I can imagine the club owner frustration They're amazing using anything to produce a sound and then mixing, remixing, distorting, amplifying etc to get the final result (ie dripping water into a bucket / bowl of water in a huge empty concrete hangar or whatever it was, recording echoes). And Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - they were also great

Erm... back on topic Tyr, a little technical question (or two) - did you focus manually / prefocus or used AF? How far have you been from the scene?