Review of the Pentax DA 16-45mm f/4.0 ED AL

www.pentax.co.uk This model comes from its KB range, and the DA mark denotes its digital dedication. Note that this lens isn’t part of the new DA* series, which are not available at the time of writing. The lens construction consists of 13 elements in 10 groups and features aspheric elements together with a high-refraction, Extra Low Dispersion glass element. Together these elements help to maintain high-resolution, high-contrast images, while reducing chromatic aberration and promoting colour accuracy. Build and Handling The lens has a metal outer barrel with a plastic inner barrel, which extracts as the zoom is moved towards the wideangle end. There’s a wide grooved zoom ring, while the manual focus ring is much narrower at the edge of the metal outer barrel. The focus scale is engraved on this barrel in front of the manual focus ring. Despite being one of the smallest and lightest of the lenses in this category, it feels pretty solid, though lacks the professional feel of the Canon and Nikon lenses in this category. With no high-tech drive motors, the AF is much noisier than others and while slower it is not problematically so even for fast-moving subjects, thanks mainly to the AF module built into the camera body. Image Quality In terms of sharpness the Pentax proves itself a contender by providing high resolution over 1000lwph. It also maintains this throughout the aperture and focal range. Optically this is as close to perfect consistency as we’d like to see. But with the wider angle comes increased fringing, with a rise of 3-3.5 pixels from centre to corner, which is obvious in many of the sample images. This is a prime example of the difficulties still to overcome in providing wideangle optics for digital sensors, especially if you need to maintain a certain price point. Verdict Pentax has announced a new DA* range, so it may be worth holding out for those. The primary advantage for Pentax/Samsung users will be the faster aperture, new AF motor and weather proofing – we can only assume that optical improvements will also be incorporated, notably the reduction of chromatic aberration, which spoils the model tested here. What Digital Camera Score 82%