Pentax smc DA 55-300mm f/4.0-5.8 ED Lens

I bought this lens recently to replace an old sigma telezoom and the Tamron 70-300mm Di LD.
This Pentax outperforms both, and even if pricier, I think is a better telephoto.
If you must have "macro" capabilities, then go with Sigma's or Tamron's flavors of the 70-300mm.

I find this lens quite sharp throughout, has great colours (Pentax style) and does not show chromatic aberration problems like the Tamron did.

One of the best points in this lens is the focal range. You'll change lenses less often, and miss less shots. Sadly the minimum focusing distance is a bit to long, if they made it 0.5m shorter it would make a big difference for the 55mm end, in my experience.

In terms of design and build, its the same as the kit lens, its fine for this price point. It has the little window in the shade to change the setting on your polariser filter (great idea Pentax!).

The aperture is not super fast (not surprising for a consumer grade lens) but its not that slow either, I find quite good in the field.What is not that great is the noisy autofocus and slowish autofocus. Its not a big issue, but when shooting birds it can disturb them...

All around I'd say its the telezoom to get.

I bought this with my Pentax K200D in addition to the standard 18-55mm kit lens. I chose it over the more typical 200mm zoom lens due to the extra reach & a lot of reviews stating this was much better quality than the cheaper Tamron 300mm zoom available. It's also a faster lens than the 200mm, with a max aperture of F5.8 at 300mm, whereas the 200mm lens has the same max aperture at only 200mm.

The lens feels pretty solid to me, the zoom is very smooth & manual focusing is pretty easy when needed. AF is a little noisy but works well, although the manual focus ring rotates which can surprise if you're holding it when it works. Comes with lens hood & decent protective case.

A few days after I got the camera & lens I went to the zoo which was an excellent opportunity to try it out. I got some fantastic shots of the animals, many of them at the max zoom setting. Although it's not the fastest lens I still managed to get some nice de-focused backgrounds & not many shots suffering from camera shake.

Highly recommended. Five stars for excellent performance & quality for the price.

I bought this for my Pentax K200 camera body and the resulting image quality is extremely good. At its first outing to test it I photographed Sanderling (birds), general landscapes and banger racing on a beach. It was January so the light was low. The results exceeded expectations.

The product itself is compact and light for the focal range and quality of images - ideal for travel. Okay, so you lose a few stops at f4.0-5.8 compared to far more expensive lenses but the trade off is worth it. I have also tried it in very low light and combined with modern digital technology, the resulting images even at f5.8 were more than acceptable. The body is as you would expect at this price point (£237) but looks robust enough for a reasonably careful user and holds well.

Being most experienced in manual focus, and only having purchased a couple of other auto-focus lenses in the past year, I have to say this is the slowest and the focal system did get confused from time-to-time requiring a refocus on a completely different object before returning to the original. Sometimes the targets were difficult so I will forgive this for the moment and see if my technique can improve on this flaw. In saying that, this did mean I missed opportunities. Notwithstanding this, when photographing racing cars on the beach, even at maximum zoom, focus lock on this was very quick and accurate resulting in some cracking images. If you know birds, Sanderling are a bit like very fast wind-up toys, and again, overall the focus was pretty good for undoubtedly a tricky number for the autofocus system to cope with.

This ocassional problem with focus is the only reason I do not give a 5 star rating but on the image quality, portability and price I would heartily recommend this lens. If you want maximum aperture control and are more likely to be static than mobile (eg in a hide), go for a more expensive fixed focal length lens. I have an old second-hand manual focus Tokina prime 300mm lens and the picture quality is tip-top, but I can see it languishing in the bag with the new 55-300mm pentax just being so much more practical. With familiarity I expect to improve on the focus flaws and get the most out of this lens.

I work on the basis that 5 star is absolutely perfect. I would award 4.5 star for this if I could.