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| Circa 1996 camera body for FA lens system. A retro style with the look and feel of the super program with autofocus was a winner in the waning days of film dominance. | |
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| This is a 'fish-eye zoom' on a film camera, but its mostly a zoom with a lot of distortion when used on the digital. | |
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| A sought after lens with a fast F/2 speed. It's physically large but it delivers. Well to theh wide on film, a modest wide angle on digital---equilivalent to a 34mm wideangle. | |
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| Sort of a dream lens for film. At 24-90 f/3.5~f/4.5 if there was ever a general purpose zoom that did it all it was this lens. It certainly made all the 35-70's and 28-70's seem inadequate. It's too long for digital. | |
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| This is the generic 28mm-F/2.8 prime. A dependable wide angle for film and boring normal for digital. The F/2.8 speed is simply nothing exotic. | |
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| In the film days, this was the one lens for all occasions except low light. As an 28-200mm f/3.8~5.6 zoom, if you could only have one lens, this was the one to take if there was plenty of light--point and shoot to the extreme. It was widely regarded as being a Tameron lens marketed with the Pentax label. A one lens solution for the masses. | |
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| This 50mm F/1.4 is a classic high speed prime 'normal' lens for film. It's closer to a portrait length for digital. Fast and of good quality anyway. | |
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| This one is underrated. At 80-320mm F/4.5~5.6, I found it a little hard to use on film bodies. Long enough to need a tripod and with no place to put one, and so heavy compared to the body that the balance was off. On the heavier K10 Digital with shake reduction, its a low cost dream lens. With a field of view approaching 500mm equivalent with the digital format it's usable as an extreme telephoto and light and fast enough to hand hold | |
The FA family of lenses from Pentax dominated the scene for around 15 years from 1989 to 2004. Many were added and dropped during the time. The FA replaced the briefly existing F series but were only cosmetically different in practice. It was said that the 'chip' that communicated with the camera body was different but not in a way that impacted how the lens operated or worked as as far as the user was concerned it is a distinction without a difference. The FA lenses are "Focus Automatic" in that they support auto focus. Pentax experimented with power zoom but it was not a marketing success and disappeared from the zoom lenses.
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| Two power contacts located about 5 o'clock in the pilot bore of KAF2 mounts. |
What did not disappear was the two extra power contacts used to power the power zoom lenses. The lens mount morphed further from the KAF mount (K=original, KA=electric contacts and 'A'uto aperture, and KAF=auto focus), to the KAF2 mount. The '2' are two electric contacts on the pilot bore.
This same power contacts were later Hijacked to supply power to the lens for operation of the SDM in lens focusing. The concept of the 'power zoom' was to allow the user to zoom the lens in point and shoot fashion from a camera body switch and have an auto 'park' position. As it turned out newer lens designs tended away from the change in size while zooming in favor of internal optical adjustments which took less power, and twisting a knob on the camera body in favor of twisting a lens ring to zoom really added nothing except another way to drain the battery.
The good thing about the FA lenses is that they provide full function to the digital camera bodies, but also can be used on ANY K mount camera ever made which includes all Pentax bodies since 1975. Obviously they don't auto focus on a not autofocus body, but they will manually focus which is the feature of the pre autofocus bodies. The only thing to remember in acquiring FA lenses for a digital camera body is that the lenses may be a little bigger and heavier than they need to be because the digital foot print is APS-C not 35mm. This makes all lenses seem as they are 50% longer in focal length than they actually are. Consequently Fish eyes don't fish, and 'wide angle to telephoto lenses' tend to be 'just telephoto' This makes the '35 to nn' and '28 to nn' vastly less useful as a single all purpose lens on digital bodies than they were on film bodies.
Over all the 'prime lenses' (Non zoom), and the 'long zooms' are the ones that migrate to digital bodies the best although the all 'work' from a mechanical standpoint.