Impulse purchase at the supermarket. Must be the season.
Shot with the K-01 matched with the DA* 50-135 F2.8 zoom. At ISO3200. Just because I can. Seriously, one of the touted benefits of the K-01 is that it is compatible with the full catalog of Pentax lenses. Technically-speaking, Pentax is not lying, but the 50-135 does look a bit funny when mounted, and the AF alternates between being snappy and dog slow where it sounds like the SDM motor is wheezing its way through the entire focus range. What I’m noticing is that if you focus on a distant object and then try to focus on a closer object, the focus is snappy. But when you focus on a close object and then focus on a distant object, focus is slow. It looks and sounds as if the camera is slowly racking to the close focus distance and then reversing direction and racking outward until focus is achieved. I’d imagine that a smarter AF system would recognize that things were getting blurrier and change directions quicker, but I’m no AF designer, just a guy on the Interwebs. I tested the DA* 16-50 F2.8 and it exhibits similar behavior. It’s not as slow though because the focus travel is shorter. Much more usable.
On the plus side, the image stabilization clearly works. This is at 135mm (195mm equivalent) shot at 1/50. That and the DA* 50-135 is a great chunk of glass, as good as a bagfull of primes.