They share superbly machined aluminium construction, exclusively designed lens hoods and slip-on caps, a very comfortable to use depth of field scale, an emerald dot to line up with the lens release button on the camera (making it convenient to switch lenses in the dark) and excellent optical performance (especially at the time of launch.)

According to Pentax itself, people at the company felt they should conceive a set of lenses with the quality and compactness to go with the newly proposed MZ-5 and MZ-3 film cameras.

By accepting a certain degree of field curvature they were able to minimise astigmatism and chromatic aberration to a bare minimum and to finetune the out-of-focus boundaries (bokeh.)

Thanks to this deliberate shift in paradigm, the gains, while hard to quantify in numbers, are tangible when looking at images and help explain the so-called 3D rendering of the Limited lenses.

[4] The lens features Pentax ghostless coating, first introduced with the FA 43mm Limited, to reduce flare to a bare minimum.

The Ghostless SMC was developed at request of the Japanese traffic police force who was faced with the problem with severe glares on photos of car plates taken during the night, thus making them unreadable.