Minolta AF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5

Lightweight performer for every camera bag There are zooms and zooms and zooms. The 35~70 mm Rokkor is a minor leaguer among Rokkor zoom lenses in terms of optics and design, but it a wonderful fill-in for every camera bag. It is extremely lightweight: I use it as a companion to a more exotic Rokkor 24~35 mm zoom, but it also makes a perfect companion to a 50 mm or 45 mm, with extender. You can pack a lot of "firepower" around all day long, with a lightweight zoom in this range, a sharp small lens, in a medium or small camera bag -- leaving loads of room for film. You might want to consider it as a basic lens: it covers the range from landscape to a portrait length [sorta, almost], and kicked up with any old 2x extender will give you a surprising number of options. But if you hike, backpack, bike, or do any outdoors things,even goof off at farmer's markets Saturday morning, you can get away with this as your one lens, though, as I mentioned, I would add a 2x extender and a circular polarizing filter [the one with the little lever on the ring if you can find one. You fingers will thank you: they are about 10 times easier to use than the other kind.] These are extremely well priced because they are ordinary among Minolta lens, basically a kit lens that still shares a rich design tradition with its more exotic [and pricey] kin.

don't sure I need it, but it is more value then money I spent Well, I bought this lens because it is extremely cheap, and I heard it is good enough, not as good as /4 , but lighter. So I bought even 2 of them- one as present to my father , one to use it on my A58. Pictures I get from it are good , sometimes even better then from sal35f18, and I definitely like them more then from 18-55 kit. Don't sure how I'll use it- I guess it is OK as street lens, not wide enough for landscapes, but better suited , because of zoom, for street portraits then primes.

A Good Choice, If You Can Find A Good One This Minolta classic is a good choice, if you're looking for this particular range of coverage. Good classic Minolta optics. Finding one may be a problem, though - as it wasn't the most popular choice when in production, and I see very few show up on the Used market in decent condition. A viable alternative would be the later (and lighter) 35-80 design - a fine 'kit' lens which is in more plentiful supply. Other later 'kit' grade variants include a 28-80 and 28-100 - both of which exhibit a problem with vignetting (shadowing) of the corners at 28mm (on film cameras), but that disappears when they are used from 35mm on up. Used on the Sony Alpha 100 Digital, the problem disappears altogether, because the camera works with less than the full image circle of the lens (the '1.5x crop factor').