You just made me love my decision not to buy the limited K-5. The black K-5 fits my hand so perfectly that any bigger/smaller makes it... er... less perfect.

Plus, I don't like silver color scheme. Now if it were red/orange/light blue/light green/lime/yellow/pure pearl white then it will make a huge difference.

Nice! Do you know how to convert Canon FD to Pentax K? I love my FD 50mm f1.4 and feels very bad to sell it.

I did a lot of research prior to buying the K-5 and found that thread in the other Pentax forum with ISO 12800 which looked too good to be true.

Just tried it for myself and still astonished. I remember the days with my GH1 and EP1 which I consider ISO 1600 borderline unusable, even with Topaz Denoise. This is 3 stops faster AND useable.


A snail life (ISO 12800!) by Tùng béo, on Flickr

LBA!

I just add the Tamron 70-300 to the list (just bought a decently cheap used one off ebay - I have been too slow several times with our Classified forum :blush. This will be the de facto "Safari lens". And just like I do with every safari lens, I will put it through my unscientific moon test.

So I guess I will be covered from 8 to 300mm (except 17mm :lol

On a somewhat unrelated note, my most expensive high quality protective filter (a Hoya HD - left over from my Micro Four Thirds days) happens to have the same filter thread as the cheapee Tamron 70-300. The lens is not even 2x more expensive than the filter.

Do you need WR? If not, I think you may prefer the K-r.

So I originally wanted to get the 18-135 WR as a travel zoom and DA* 55 for portrait (with my current Tamron 90mm f2.5 macro) and that was supposed to be it.

After several posts in here, I have contracted LBA.

So I went for the 35mm limited (already in love with its general-purpose-ness and knife-like sharpness) and planning to save for the Sigma 8-16 (stepping into ultra wide world - never done it before) and DA* 50-135 (portrait, sport, birding) and DA 18-55 WR ("rainy days" travel lens).

The plan is to take the Sigma and DA WR during travel. Reason is that I tend to take travel pics at wide end anyway. If weather gets incremental / going to the beach, I just switch to the WR for a peace of mind.

The more "artistic" works will be done with the limited, Sigma, Tamron macro and DA*.

What do you guys think? Is there any glaring hole in my plan? Any additional suggestion?

When I look at the FA line up, I see much merit in 31 limited (wide), 43 limited (true normal) and 77 limited (short tele portrait).
Now looking at the DA line up, I see much merit in the 15 limited (ultra wide), 21 limited (wide), 35 limited (macro, normal-ish) and 70 limited (portrait).

I don't see how the 40mm limited fits at all. In term of focal length, it's a 60mm equivalent which is... not really normal. In term of f stop, it's a f2.8 which isn't that fast. I can't help but wonder if Pentax just decided to make a pancake lens and since pancake lenses are not the usual thing, they just chose a strange focal length for the fun of it.

I did a quick ebay search a while back and found that the 40 limited was the most popular result for "Pentax limited lens", compared to the other limited.

Am I missing something here?

So I guess I'll go with the 50-135 then. Cheers.

OMG, cheers for this, mate. So it seems if something happened to my K-5, I can get a K-x as back up.

Cheers all! Guess I was just too paranoid. First few days and I have already loved the lens so much. I hope this will be THE replacement of my favourite Micro Four Third lens (the 20mm f1.7).

@hefty1: OMG I'm jealous of all your limited!!!