Pentax smc FA 43 mm f/1.9 Limited
1. Introduction
No other company has as many lenses with untypical parameters as Pentax. For instance when most of companies feature a 85 mm f/1.4 or f/1.8 device in their line-up as a typical portrait lens, in the case of the Pentax such a lens has been withdrawn from the market for some time now and we get a 77 mm model with f/1.8 aperture instead. When it comes to zoom lenses, the situation is the same. Almost all important market players offer a 70-200 mm class instrument, sometimes with f/2.8, sometimes with f/4.0 aperture. Pentax, on the other hand, has the unusual smc DA* 60–250 mm f/4.0 ED [IF] SDM model.
The next untypical lens is the Pentax smc FA 43 mm f/1.9. It is a full frame device which can serve as an equivalent of a standard lens with 1.8/50 parameters in the case of other companies. Of course it si a completely casual comparison; in fact, you can find more differences than similarities between those two. A classic 50 mm instrument gives you an angle of view of 46.8 degrees whereas the Pentax – 53.4 degrees. By the way it is true only if you use it on an analogue reflex camera because in the case of a digital one you are simply doomed to work only on APS-C/DX sensors, and then the angle of view amounts to just 36.5 degrees. Classic 50 mm lenses usually boast f/1.8 apertures (sometimes f/1.7 but we even saw f/2.0 in the past), the aperture of the Pentax is f/1.9. Currently the 1.8/50 models, available on the market, are cheap constructions, sometimes very shoddily made to boot. The Pentax, tested here, belongs to the top-of-the-range Limited series - it is very solidly build and costs 5-6 times more. All these properties make it a very interesting optical instrument – small wonder we decided to take a closer look at it.
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The lens was borrowed for testing purposes courtesy of the Fotozakupy.pl shop.
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