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All posts tagged "tokina"


Thursday, January 20, 2011

More Glass for Less: A Simple Guide to Inexpensive Lenses

Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 08:00 AM

As more people get into photography as a hobby, a common refrain heard is that it is an expensive hobby. It is not without some truth, as hobbies by their nature can involve spending large outlays of money since it is human nature to delve deeper into our interests, and hobbies that involve any kind of gear will have many opportunities for the hobbyist to spend their hard-earned money on. Not helping is today's world of marketing departments' promises of being better at what you do if you buy their companies' products or services.

Even if you ignore the messages from marketing, you still need some basic gear to take a photo, like a lens, and lenses can be very very expensive. Lenses can range from the popular f/2.8 zooms (as much as US$2,000+) to the super telephoto lenses (too much). Thankfully, there are cheap options out there, some good, some downright awful. So what does a budget (and budding) photographer buy? Well, here's a short roundup of some lenses that can be considered to be not too expensive.

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Monday, July 5, 2010

Tokina Launches 16-28mm f/2.8 lens for 35mm-sized Sensors

Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 07:45 AM

http://www.dpreview.com/news/1007/1...mnikoncanon.asp

Did I mention I like Tokina lenses? Out of all the third-party lens makers Tokina is one of my favourites, dating back to their 28-70/2.6-2.8 zoom lens. In addition to being quite a good performer, the thing was built like a pro-grade Nikkor lens - not surprising since the founders were ex-Nikon engineers.

Today they've just announced the availability and pricing of the 16-28mm f/2.8 zoom in Nikon and Canon mounts. I heard about the product development announcement back in PMA 2010 (essentially an announcement of an announcement), and I was expecting a version of the 11-16/2.8 for 35mm sensors. It now appears to be a new optical formula, and comes with Tokina's take on the piezo-electric AF motor, called Silent Drive Motor (SD-M; I guess all the nice names have been taken).

There are two downsides to this lens. The first is that like the Nikkor 14-24/2.8, there is no way to attach filters. While digital photography has rendered a lot of filters obsolete, there are still a few useful filters that I still use, like neutral density filters and the occasional circular polariser. The second is that its announced list price, US$1400, is quite a bit more than the original 11-16/2.8, which was announced at US$800. It is not going to be quite the bargain that the 11-16/2.8 was. That said, if it's anything like the 11-16/2.8 optically, I think it's going to be a very worthy alternative to the even more expensive Nikkor 14-24/2.8. Canon users might still want to stick to their 16-35/2.8s though.


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