Official DA17-70SDM Announcement

Just saw this morning on dpreview.com that the DA 17-70/F4 SDM has been officially announced. I'm glad this is finally "out" as this is the ultimate walkaround lens I've been waiting for. That is, if it's as sharp and good end-to-end as my DA 16-45/F4. Some of the preview comments that I've seen have been "ok" in my opinion, having distortion at the wide end, and having to stop down at the wide and long end to avoid vigneting and lots of CA :(

However, those notes are from a random french magazine using a (possibly) pre-production unit, so I'll wait for the official reviews to come out.

The actual notes don't show anything hugely revealing over the specs and Pentax press release. The lens is almost the same size as the 16-45 which is great (17-70 is 75 mm × 93.5 mm and 485g, the 16-45 is 72 mm × 92 mm and 356G) and just a bit heavier. Course, if this means I don't have to carry two lenses in my bag to get walk-around coverage, that's great. Sucks to lose that tiny bit on the wide end (especially if there's vignetting) but it's really only 1.5mm in reality.

One other interesting bit is that because of the SDM auto-focus mount (the * part of DA*) if the lens is used on a non-SDM enabled lens (ie: other than the k10/20 range) it will default back to manual focus. This is a bit sucky, but I suppose compromises have to be made (and as I have a K20, this doesn't bother me much at all :)

No word on availability yet :(