70-210mm supertest images: Conwy Castle.
Pentax K5, 70mm, infinity focus, 100ASA, auto WB, manual mode.
This is a classic view of Conwy Castle from Benarth Hill to the south, however not that many visitors make it to this side.
Most are shooting more into the light from the estuary or town. I chose a nice sunny day and set up the tripod in the shade of some trees.
UPDATE: additional lenses included in this test:
- Tamron SP 35-210mm f3.5-4.2. The other adaptall SP x-210mm zoom.
- Tamron 23A SP 60-300mm f3.5-5.4. One of the most reputable SP adaptalls with a 5x zoom range covering the same focal lengths.
- Tokina RMC 70-210mm f3.5. Tokinas own label precursor to the tokina VS1.
- Sigma DC 18-125mm f3.5-5.6. A modern designed for digital zoom.
- Sigma DC 17-70mm f2.8-4.5. A modern "prosumer" designed for digital zoom.
- Pentax DAL 55-300mm f4-5.8. Although nominally the Pentax "consumer" TP zoom this lens is optically well regarded.
- 13 Oct: Several adaptall zooms.
- SMC Pentax FA 70-200mm f4-5.6 The F and FA zooms from the 1990's
tend not to be too highly regarded but you can see for yourself how this one compares.
- (May 2017) Vivitar superzooms from 1980's;
The two sigmas were manually focussed to avoid any AF discrepancies. The 18-125mm was zoomed back a little from 70mm position to get f4.5 aperture -
reported as 58mm in exif. The 17-70mm was at 70mm zoom but is clearly showing a wider field of view than the MF lenses.
One K5 idiosyncracy I noticed on examining the images is that the pentax, unlike the samsung, does tweak internally the white balance
to suit each lens. This is how temperature and tint were reported for the RAW files in LR3.6 for each lens
(temp: lower values cooler = bluer; tint: lower values = more green, higher = more red):
Lens | 19AH | 52A | 26A | kiron ZL | VS1-kiron | VS1 tokina | VS1 komine |
temp | 5000 | 5600 | 5500 | 5250 | 5050 | 5000 | 5200 |
tint | 18 | 15 | 12 | 14 | 15 | 19 | 13 |
Significant differences. The effect of this is to tend to average out the colour differences between the lenses.
I did in fact nudge the more outlier values back towards the mean so that the colour differences between the lenses became more evident.
The only other PP I did was some exposure adjust to get consistency, a little recovery (clipping on the white flags) and spot removal.
The images were also cropped down to 2700px vertically so that the images align more or less in the comparison windows.
Click on the thumbnail on the left or drag on the crops below to view different parts of the image.
Use the dropdowns to select the lenses and the buttons below them to select the apertures for comparison.
Image sizes ~3.5MB, allow time to load.
NOTE: if you change lens or f-number and the image doesn't seem to load, try refreshing the page.
If that doesn't work try a different browser eg Chrome (firefox seems a little sticky).