Tokina ATX-Pro 28-70/2.8 AF for Pentax KAF

This lens is just like the Tokina ATX-Pro 80-200 a professional looking lens. The finishing looks very durable and solid. I used it mostly together with my other Tokina lens and really liked the fact that it's one stop faster than the FA28-70/4. It has the same MF clutch like the other ATX-Pro lenses making it very good for manual focus to. It is also a lot bigger and heavier and I didn't take it with me on hollyday. I still use it on my Ist-D because it's f2.8 making portraits looking very good. Original it came with a soft case that can be attached at a belt, but only used it to store in in the closet.

Performance
At the wide end it already delivers very good center performance wide open, but the corners a still a bit soft on a crop body. On a full frame it's even worse. At f4 the corners get as sharp as the center and overall it delivers a nice looking picture. At f5.6 there isn't much to complain with top score.
At 50mm the lens already performs very good even wide open the only backdraw is a bit lower contrast compared with f4. At 70mm the wide open performance suffers from a bit of front focus, f4 makes it better but the difference at f5.6 is big. This looks bad but when you look at the FA28-70/4AL then this lens performs stop-by-stop better. It also not so uncommon for this kind of lenses and the Sigma at that time wasn't any better and less good build. In every day shot's (portraits) at 70mm and f4 look very decent and are good enough for 20x30 prints.
The bokeh of this lens isn't as good as from the ATX-Pro 80-200/2.8 but this is normal and I haven't seen a wide angle zoom lens having a great bokeh.

Overall I really liked the lens except at 70mm/2.8. Probably it would be better called the 28-70/2.8-4. But still it was good value and when you know that at f2.8 you have to stop at 50mm it's a good lens. This was the reason to do this test so I was able to understand why some shots weren't what I would expect. On a digital body the DA16-45/4 is as good and has more wide angle, but misses >45mm. What I read about the DA*16-50/2.8 is that is performs equal to the DA16-45 so this lens does even come close to this lens, but again misses wide angle. So why pick this lens? It's a nice focal length for stage work and close indoor sports, or it making a nice kit when using with a extreme wide angle lens like a DA12-24/4.