Just made a quick brickwall test at 2.8, the building didn't have big sections of wall without windows so this is a relatively small section taken at a close distance of about 6 feet.
[ Images ]
Nothing fancy about my shooting method hand held kept camera as level and straight to the plane of the wall as I could manage physically. No additional tweaking in capture one pro the program itself adds a very slight amount of sharping on reduction from raw to jpeg.
It is good of you to share these images, but sadly they don't appear to flatter the lens. At a cost of around £1250 in the UK (the top end of the Pentax DA price range), it would seem reasonable to expect to see better performance than is evident here. It might be that the testing method is inadequate, or that this is an inferior example of the lens, or a combination of both. However, if further tests give similar results, it would seem wise to consider returning this lens.
Philip
I really have not seen this softness on my iMac monitor, I don't need to view at 100% magnification all over the image to determine if it's sharp enough both for printing or normal screen size viewing. I crop to the image size I want as an end user either by zooming with the lens or changing the lens to one the covers the FOV I need to capture.
You know, something similar happened to me years ago, when I bought the DA 16-45/4 lens. I noticed immediately, that it was mildly de centered. Return it, not return it, and later, before the warranty period expired, send it for repair, not to send it for repair? Well, I was afraid that it might come back even in the worse shape. That was my another experience with one my Canon camcorder. I got it back from the warranty repair (Canon Service, Toronto) in such a shape, that I simply had to cry. Since then I am avoiding Canon products. O.K. back to my lens, I think that I made a mistake not to return it within those first 15 days.
