Saturday, December 7, 2019

another plan 'B'

First off: the K-5 has finally sold, and the silver lenses will accompany it. I shall miss it, but its overlaps with the μ43 gear were considerable and left it with less to do. The K200d and unsold 18-50re shown here cost ~$90 total and are explicitly the foul-weather CCD kit. No video and no images above iso1600 assure its niche status; it neither breaks my small budget nor threatens to take over the gear shelf.

My Plan B¹ was to find a nicely priced 25mm Lumix lens and let the 30mm Sigma depart. Two months later nobody requested the Sigma and no real deals (holiday or otherwise) showed on the 25. For less than its going price though, a used silver 20/1.7 appeared. Acquiring that would keep the 30 in play and make the adapted 35/3.5 macro less appealing as a carry-often option. I never owned a silver 20mm, which apparently is a v.2 copy instead of  the two-tone v.1 that I've owned in the past; it's not a big deal which version as only cosmetics really changed, but on a silver body the silver sounds nice And makes it clearly not the 14/2.5 when I find a tiny lens in the bag. So now on to plan B² - the 20mm is coming, and the 30/2.8 is back off the market and into the rotation.

Interesting how one rates the versatility of zooms vs. features of primes. A 14-30mm zoom doesn't exist at the speeds I will now carry*, but the 12-35mm f/2.8 costs and weighs more than my tiny trio. The GX7 allows panoramic shots to make the 14/2.5 useful for wider images, both cameras stabilize all three primes, and when lens one is attached the other two are much smaller in the bag.

* Yes the 12-32 Lumix covers that range well in a tiny body, but at much slower speeds (f/3.5-5.6 vs 2.5/1.7/2.8). I have the Yi 12-40 when convenience wins; it cost little after the M1 body sold, it's better corrected optically than nearly all major-brand μ43 zooms and it's 100g less than the three primes.

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