{"id":15742,"date":"2015-10-07T10:50:14","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T17:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/?p=15742"},"modified":"2015-10-07T10:50:14","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T17:50:14","slug":"pentax-35-70-lens-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wkoopmans.ca\/notebook\/?p=15742","title":{"rendered":"Pentax 35-70 lens test"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PentaxMESuper-6397\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Zoom lenses that offered commonly used\u00a0focal lengths of around 35-70mm were prevalent in the latter days of manual focus film SLR’s\u00a0 Pentax Lens tests Macro Zooms<\/a>.\u00a0 The quality though varied greatly so without actually trying them its hard to say how well they will perform.\u00a0 With this in mind I mounted my recently acquired Pentax A 35-70 f4 on a Pentax ME Super with a roll of expired Kodak 400.\u00a0 As you would expect the film is grainy but that doesn’t detract from the intent which is to test the lens.\u00a0 What I am looking for is sharpness across the frame and how much chromatic aberrations it creates as well as the more subjective ‘rendering of out of focus areas’.\u00a0 In all three this lens exceeded my expectations.\u00a0 Even with the aperture wide open the sharpness continues from the center all the way into the corners.\u00a0 There was hardly a hint of any fringing or chromatic aberration although a tougher test on a more demanding digital camera might turn up some I suspect as seen\u00a0bellow.\u00a0 If you look around the edge of the white petals you will see the softness and fringing of this digital shot at f4.0\u00a0 that said\u00a0that\u00a0goes away\u00a0by f5.6.\u00a0 I would say this is\u00a0optically the\u00a0best SMC A zoom lens in this\u00a0general focal range\u00a0that I have come across for use\u00a0on a digital camera.
\n\"_K3_8406-Edit\"<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
\nAnd finally the out of focus or ‘bokeh’ areas of the image have nice smooth transitions that add to the three\u00a0dimensionality.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s also a very compact lens that isn’t much larger than a prime lens however the main compromise with this lens is the rather slow maximum aperture of f4.<\/p>\n\n\t\t