[Mr Guy]

Maybe this is me being an ass, but I'd cause that the thing to remember is that there are a lot of people who respect Ken Rockwell, but there's are tons more who think he's a complete idiot. He says a lot of stuff that's flat out wrong, so while his opinions may be spot on for that particular lens, I'd be very very careful lusting after it based just on his recommendation.

I was going to write that the kit lens shouldn't ever be more than a $50 decision, but oddly, it doesn't look like there ARE decent prices on a D90 kit with the standard 18-55mm kit lens. I'm not even seeing that particular package, probably because they don't expect people to jump right into the D90 without either having lenses or wanting a slightly higher quality superzoom.

The one thing I'm not sure what you mean is in regards to the "shallowness" of the 35mm. It's an f/1.8 with a minimal focal length of 1 foot. That means you can focus on the tip of an eyelash and have the eyeball be out of focus, if your eyes are good enough to focus that manually (AF wouldn't ever be able to pull it off in practice).

I'd focus more on the field of view than perceived shallowness. 35mm is a lot better walk around length than 50mm on a crop body DSLR.


The flip side to the versatility of zoom lenses is that it's far easier to have a much higher quality lens with a prime lens. As I've said before, Nikon and Canon primes are basically remounted versions of their film lenses. They have different lines of prime lenses at different price points. Each one is going to be relatively faster and most likely slightly higher quality than their zoom lens line at the same price point. Pentax went a different way compared to Nikon and Canon. Pentax has a traditional quality for price advantage in terms of lenses, and has built their reputation on the strength of their prime lenses. Instead of having multiple lines of primes, they generally only have one or two at a given focal length, but they are on par quality wise with the best the others have to offer at a cheaper price.

Nikon's lines are a bit foreign to me, because I'm not familiar enough with them to read their acronyms, but a typical pattern using Canon as the example, with the exception of the super cheap $100 low end 50mm, would be Canon or Nikon would have $400 f/1.8 version, a $600 to $800 mid grade f/1.4 with better glass, and then a very high end version L glass version at f/1.2 with the best glass in the $1.5k+ price range.

Pentax, on the other hand, tends to use different focal lengths for their primes because they seem to not care in the slightest about competing directly, but instead turn out lenses according whatever the heck it is that inspires their engineers. They may only have one lens at, or close to, that focal length, but it'd be comparable in quality to L lens, but usually slightly slower and around half the price. For example, Canon has a beautiful 35mm f/1.4L around $1500. Pentax has a droolworthy 31mm f/1.8 at $800, and a stunning 35mm f/2.8 Macro at $500.