I Got It On eBay

One of the best Weird Al Yanovich parodies is "I Got It On eBay"?  But unlike that song, I get some awesome stuff on eBay.  I have a Tamron 28-200mm zoom for my Pentax that I bought on eBay some years ago for about $170, barely used.  It works pretty well.  I just received a Pentax 100-300mm for $84 (including shipping).  Again, used, but the autofocus works better than the Tamron, and it produces very nice images.

The first picture is the Tamron at 200mm, focused on my nearest neighbor's house, about 325 meters away.

And here's the Pentax at 300mm.

Very nice for wildlife shots, and perhaps quick pictures of the Moon.

UPDATE: Blowing up the images, you realize the enormous quality difference in the optics.

The Pentax:

The Tamron:

And remember: the Pentax is at 300mm, and the Tamron at 200mm focal length.

UPDATE 2: A picture my wife took with the new lens of some gladiolas.  OMG.

UPDATE 3: And a series of progressively larger crops.

What amazes me is how many of these somewhat older Pentax brand lenses--yet still having the autofocus capabilities that work with the current digital SLRs--are available dirt-cheap on eBay.