I bought a Tokina 28-70mm f2.8-4.3 zoom lens used for $20 from Samy's in SB (btw, the majority of the people working there are a bit on the asshole side, they all seem so bothered by customers it's like I'm back in Greece...) This is a ~20 year old lens, from the SZ-X series, so the middle-of-the-road series by Tokina (which, I found out, was founded by Nikon engineers, and therefore shared Nikon's quirks regarding their lens qualities and naming schemes). I took it on a two day backpacking trip on my *ist DS, thinking it might be a decent all-around lens -- good focal lengths, sensitive enough for night shooting. Nevertheless, this lens had a few difficulties, some of which have to do with its age and consequent lack of coatings, and some of which have to do with my using beyond its intended capabilities:
a) high contrast areas have blue halos, especially if they're not exactly in focus -- I was told this is due to lack of coating. I compared its performance at 50mm to my pentax 50mm f2 and the blue haze issue is not present in the pentax. However, the tokina seems to have a deeper DOF at the same focal length and aperture. This stumps me, because I thought DOF was not affected by number of elements in the lens...
b) the tokina systematically overexposes sunny shots
c) the tokina suffers from very strong flares in wide-angle sky shots
Where it did excel (but no better than my 50mm f2) is low light indoors shots.
This is the album shot with it.
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