Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Sample Photos, Real-world Use, and Specs | Round Glass Review

In the near future, AI will design perfect camera lenses. Designs for any spec, aperture range, and image format with perfect MTF charts will drop out of computer systems every day, or even more often. New designs will drop far more quickly than they can be made and marketed. And they will be perfect, uniform, sterile, and absolutely boring. Imperfection is, after all, the playground of beauty because no more-sterile, more-boring look exists than perfection. And those perfect future lenses will arrive, sell or not, and disappear faster than 90s rappers could drop new lyrics. Photographic lenses will become transient, temporary, and unexciting.

And then, someday, someone will stumble across an old lens for sale, one with a bit of coma mixed with astigmatism in the corners, very slight chromatic aberration in the center, and an image character defined by and made better because of those minor flaws. That photographer will fall immediately in love with the look that lens provides and, if that lens they pick up is the 31mm FA Limited, then yes, that love will be well deserved.

The 31mm is as close to perfect as, I think, lenses designed by people should go. This lens delivers incredible sharpness stopped down a bit and stunning subject isolation opened up. Across the aperture range, the 31mm creates captivating image rendering that, in the hands of a photographer who can use that image character, will deliver images that keep viewers’ eyes on the scenes. Slight imperfection keeps our attention – the way that asymmetrical freckles across a nose blend into the shapes of high cheeks and flirt with the undersides of eyes – for instance, provides an imperfect avenue for our attention. Photographs do the same thing when a slight swirl in the out-of-focus background directs our view around a scene and eventually toward a sharp, isolated subject that tells a story about a moment.

Camera lenses should never be perfect because humans – photographers and viewers – are ourselves imperfect. We will always relate to the imperfect beauty in a near-but-not-quite-perfect image. And for creating those, the Pentax 31mm f/1.8 Limited is one of the perfect lenses.

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Video Index:
0:00 - Intro
0:11 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Round Glass Review
1:45 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Specifications
2:27 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Tips & Tricks
4:48 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Seidel Analysis
9:17 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Lens Diagram
10:26 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Video Use
11:57 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Strengths & Weaknesses
14:56 - Pentax-FA 31mm f/1.8 Limited Review

References:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/lensrevi...
https://us.ricoh-imaging.com/product/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentax_...
https://www.handprint.com/ASTRO/ae4.html
https://www.lonelyspeck.com/a-practic...

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