Pentax SMC P-DA Fish-Eye 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 ED Lens Review

Pentax SMC P-DA Fish-Eye 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 ED (IF) Performance

At 10mm, sharpness isn't really the strong point of this lens. Even so, performance in the centre is very good from maximum aperture. Unfortunately the same can't be said about the performance of this lens towards the edges of the frame, which starts off poor at maximum aperture and only increases to fair levels of clarity as the lens is stopped down.

At 14mm, this lens doesn’t perform much better. Centre sharpness is greatly reduced at all apertures, and the clarity recorded towards the edges of the frame isn't much better. However, stopping down to f/8 does result in outstanding sharpness in the centre of the frame.

Finally, at 17mm, sharpness in the centre improves to very good levels again at maximum aperture, and clarity towards the edges is fair. Stopping down to f/8 improves performance in the centre of the frame to outstanding levels once again, although sharpness towards the edges of the frame falls behind somewhat.

MTF@10mm

MTF@14mm

MTF@17mm

How to read our charts The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column. The scale on the left side is an indication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple. For this review, the lens was tested on a Pentax K-5 IIs using Imatest.

Chromatic aberrations are very high at 10mm, exceeding 2.5 pixel widths towards the edges of the frame. This level of fringing will cause problems along high contrast edges in large prints or in harsh crops from the edges of the frame.

CA@10mm

CA@14mm

CA@17mm

How to read our charts Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Severe chromatic aberration gives a noticeable fringing or a halo effect around sharp edges within the picture. It can be cured in software. Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. For this review, the lens was tested on a Pentax K-5 IIs using Imatest.

Falloff of illumination is well controlled with the corners of the frame only being 1.27 stops darker than the image centre at 10mm and at 17mm the corners are 0.5 stops darker. Visually uniform illumination is achieved with the lens stopped down to f/5.6 or beyond throughout the zoom range.

Distortion is as you might expect from a fisheye. Using a fisheye lens will always be a creative choice, where the distortion is used to enhance your image.

During testing, this lens proved itself very resistant to flare and contrast stays strong, even when shooting into the light.

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