[GEli]

I'm not so fond of this lense. I've only played with it in the shop, taking a few test shots, but it reminded me a great deal of the kit lense in that it's almost intolerably soft when wide open at any focal length (though it's slightly worse at 50mm). The photozone.de review agrees with me and gives it a pretty nasty rating of 2/5 for value and 1.5/5 for optical quality.

However, all is not lost! If you only ever intend to use this lense outdoors, where you can stop down to f/8 or smaller all the time, it should be rather useable. You might also consider taking a look at some of the older Pentax medium to long telezooms. I have a Pentax A 70-210mm f/4 that's just gorgeous through its entire range. It's a manual focus lense, so wouldn't be too useful for sports and the like, but is perfectly acceptable for most anything else even with the standard focusing screen. Here is a (rather large) example of a pretty heavily cropped image I took with this lense at f/4, 210mm on my K10D. It's been slightly desaturated to fit into a series, but this is more of an example of the level of sharpness (this is an unsharpened image) you can achieve even wide open with this lense. Here is an example of the 1:4 macro it can do at the 70mm end. It has a nice focus lock for when you're doing macro work and as you can see is rather sharp through the whole range. The only negatives for this lense are the manual focusing and the weight. It's a bit hefty at around 700g, or the weight of a K10D body without the battery. I got mine for $100 from a local shop used, but I overpaid in the excitement of having finally found a copy - you can probably get it for less if you buy from another photog rather than a shop.