The Irix 15mm F2.4 Firefly Pentax is designed for full-frame Pentax cameras and offers a minimum focusing distance of 28cm. The lens is technically identical to the Irix Blackstone, but the housing is a made of other material. The Blackstone is firmer and finished with precious materials. The Firefly is particularly suitable for photographers who are on the road a lot and therefore not want to take along to heavy equipment.
The lens is provided with a ‘neutrino’ coating to exclude any kind of ghosting, color aberration, and flare as much as possible. The lens consists of 15 elements in 11 groups. The construction includes three elements with a high refractive index (HRI), two with an extra-low dispersion (ED), and two aspherical lenses which are responsible for minimization of distortion and aberrations. In addition, this construction offers a significant improvement in image edge clarity and overall image quality.
The manual focus ring feels slightly less high-quality than the Blackstone but provides a good feedback. The Irix 15mm F2.4 lens is designed to deliver the best optical performance for high- quality full frame SLRs.