Lens question

[RBennett]

How good is a 50mm - 200mm lens?? I'm looking at purchasing that along with my new Pentax K100D and I was just curious as to how good the lens is? Is that a decent zoom for things like the Safari?

 

[Cricket2]

That rebate sure makes it look better and better

 

[jann1033]

http://www.photodo.com/topic_58.html
if you mean range, i have a 70-200 ( canon) and like the range but the extra 20mm would help make it more "general purpose" it's still to long imo for a walk around type lens but would be nice for zoom. the canon is super sharp so i can easily crop enough to get decent 300mm looking shots, don't know how this would do for that. it might be a little short for the safari ride if it isn't really really sharp imo. i';ve taken birds maybe 75 ft away( i am a terrible judge of distance) i'll post a photo later if i can granddaughter is up and moving

 

[ukcatfan]

I am sure Groucho will come along to tell more(he has one), but it is a well respected lens. It probably will not get everything on the safari, but it is going to be tough to get a 300mm shot on it anyway with the way you bounce around.

Kevin

 

[Groucho]

I didn't do very well on the Safari, but that's mainly because I wasn't shooting in shutter priority mode, and the speeds were too slow. It was also later in the day and not as bright.

Here's a shot maxed out at 200mm... not quite as sharp as it should be (I think the focus was a hair off), but nice 'n' colorful.

And here's one more in the middle, 138mm.

Another, 125mm: (I don't know why these are missing exif data, they are there in my gallery in the full-size versions... something is screwy with the resizing. One more thing for me to work on...)

Here's a few WDW examples. They'll be even better when I finish redoing them all in Lightroom. Yes, I know that a couple are at 700 pixels and one's at 1024; this was before I set 800 to my minimum in my gallery and I wanted to least one to show some extra detail.

Here's one of my Safari shots... 180mm, a relatively slow AF system (my DL has a simpler and slower AF than other Pentaxes), and not shooting in shutter priority meant that it's not as sharp as it should be. 1/180th second, F5.6, and ISO 200.

Don't let anyone tell you that you can't do short DoF with F5.6. It helps that it's at 200mm...

All in all, it's a really nice little lens and certainly worth the low price. Stick it on your K100D it'll even be stabilized, and think about all the money you'll save over the C/N stabilized lenses of similar focal length. (OK, that's not really a fair comparison, but what the hey!) It's small size and weight also make it a great companion to the kit lens. It's hard to go wrong with the combination of the two, plus a 50mm F1.4 for low-light.