ForestWander Nature Photography Gear Reviews

3 Comments

1. Guinette Newman

   Posted January 13, 2010 at 3:55 pm | Permalink

   Kenko 420-1600mm Vari Super Telephoto Zoom Lens with Mount for Pentax. I have found that this lens works well with 1stD On AV setting as well as with Manuel Setting. I also use the 3200ASA setting. Along with my 28-300mm AF Sigma I find I don’t need any other lens. Bird pictures halfbolck away are good with-out a tripod. Would recommend this for anyone. Commetacamera sales as well. Calvin
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. Chipmunk

   Posted January 13, 2010 at 4:56 pm | Permalink

   Great lens for the price. I would recomend this lens to people that plan on taking the occasional extreamely long distance photo’s, if you plan on using a lens like this the majority of the time you take photo’s, you might want to spend a litle extera for something a little better. I have taken some good photo’s already and have only had my Pentax K100D camera and lenses for less than a month. The lens does require a good amount of light, but around the 1600mm it needs about the same amount of light as the 900mm lens I have for my Minolta 35mm camera, so it’s not to overly bad, you just need to shoot on a sunny day. The macro on it is decent for that size of lens.
   Rating: 4 / 5

3. Daniel Lee

   Posted January 13, 2010 at 6:28 pm | Permalink

   I own this in the Canon EOS mount.. they are in fact all the same, just ships with a different T-mount adapter, and the 420-1600 just ships with a 2x teleconverter.

   This is a very light weight lens, especially for its focal length, it has no aperture blades, it’s completely empty on the inside, its like an old style hand telescope. When sources of strong constrast/light are coming toward the camera, expect heavy chromatic aberration, free of chromatic aberration in other situations.

   However, I’ve found a particularly excellent use for this lens, which is taking great photos of the moon on a tripod with a shutter release cable on my Canon 30D.

   Although be warned, the lens is very physically long, although light, it makes focussing extremely difficult, especially on a tripod, as there is no tripod collar, you attached the camera to the tripod, then when you zoom the lens all the way (linear pull zoom) the lens is over 30cm long (12 inches!), although light because its empty, its supported on the tripod from the camera base, so soon as you touch the lens or camera, or the focussing ring, the image in the view finder shakes like crazy while trying to focus, making it hard to focus on the most useful application with this lens… on a tripod.

   You can only use this lens hand held in full day light, and if you’re doing so you’ll need a shutter speed of 1/500 sec to eliminate blur from your own movement (due to the massive focal length), 1/250 sec is the minimum for sharp shots I could personally get.

   And shooting in daylight, whether hand held or tripod, you’re going to want to use a 1A sky filter AND a polarising filter (or at least one of them) to increase colour and contrast, luckily this thing comes with a lens hood.

   The top of this lens screws off easily, so you can keep the lens pieces clean, if they ever develop fungus, good thing about this lens is water wont damage it, as it doesnt even have aperture blades, just glass and coated metal.

   Though since the tip screws off you could cut a circle out of some black card then a hole in the middle and insert it into the middle of the lens to create your own aperture to try and improve sharpness and increase depth of field, and reduce aberration and flare etc.

   I hope this helps.

   Also, forgot to mention that this lens has pretty good macro capabilities (in terms of enlargement in close focus objects with miniscule depth of field).
   Rating: 3 / 5