The first fisheye zoom ever, was the Pentax one, the 10-28mm, and at the time it was realy high priced and considered completely useless.
In this apsc-digital era, fisheye were close to disappear... all the 15-16mm lenses become very distorting wide lenses, no 180degrees over diagonal. After Nikon 10.5mm and Olympus 8mm 3.5, Pentax renewed his concept with the 10-17mm, first product of Tokina-Hoya and Pentax cooperation. Few months after Pentax announcement here it is the Tokina AT-X107dx.

It spots a SD lens and an internal focus system, as well as a new coating named waterproof, that grants to let you easyly wipe off any fingerprint or spot from lens surface.

photo courtesy of AGNOS, happy new owner of the Tokina fisheye zoom.

Panorama use:
Well, it covers 2 classes of lenses used for panorama: the fullframe fisheye, that means 6shots plus zenit and nadir, tot of 8 shots for a full spherical, and the use of the classic film fullframe fisheye (the 16mm) on apsc sensors, that means a very high quality and easy stitching multirow pano, made of 18 pictures, 2rows of 8, +/-30 degrees, +zenit and nadir (not always needed).
It could cover another 2, ever more interesting, if hacked!!

Hacks:
If we can put this lens on a fullframe digital camera, and if we saw off the fixed light shade, theorically we could have a lens that's very similar in use to the 8mm on apsc cameras, as is for the 10.5 nikkor, with a great advantage of zooming... so with the same lens it would be possible to cover both circular and fullframe fisheye techniques. my friend Michel Thoby* is attempting to discover if it is worth doing it.


[...to be continued...]

Links:
official website,
adapters page
one of the first panorama with this lens: by michael stoss
confront with sigma 8mm f4
Testing Tokina by Flemming V.Larsen
* An extensive panoramic survey about this lens from the great michel thoby

15 dicembre 2006
I start asking here and there if some shop lets me try the lens, or have some preorder of it.
All tries in NE Italy have the same reply: Nobody knows anything about a fisheye zoom, and they wouldn't order a thing like that to stock, neither if 10 photographers would enter that door asking for it. Some week later I speak about it with Agnos, briefly, but we are buisy with other panorama-related things.

15 Janvier 2007
I'm somehow sintonized with Michel, we usually develop ideas in parallel way, however he is always one step ahead, and begins one of his usual scientific and deep analysis to the problem.
here, the thing begins!!

18 gennaio 2007:
I cannot measure the lens, I cannot cross my lasers nor my eyes to measure the NPP of it, but I draw all kinds of head ipothesys. It is a personal thing.
I owned the Pentax 17-28mm since it was the only fisheyezoom ever, and was pointed out to be an useless lens, no more than a circus phenomenon. I'll dedicate him a section in my UnUseful Lenses pages, forthcoming...
Agnos can't retrive that piece of grinded coke bottles in Italy. So he opens ebay...

25 gennaio 2007:
I got from Agnos an empy message, with a picture only. It is the picture you can see above in this page.
One pecture is1.000 words. A fisheye picture is 1.001.