I'm a budding photographer who just bought a K100D. Since I don't see a lot of new-ish stuff here, I'm going to try and sort of go through what I think of this camera as I start to use it.
First up, the First Impressions (I only got it yesterday
in no order:
- Wow, it's heavy. (I previously had a Canon A620). Good heavy. As in, "plastic is this heavy!?" heavy. As in, this thing has steel inside. Nice.
- Wow, the lens I bought is loud. (Pentax SMC-P FA 50mm F/1.4) zzzzip! Zzzzzip!
- Doesn't focus so well in low light without the flash. No surprise here, every review says is, and I'm pretty sure the manual says so as well.
- Manual focusing is fun. Twist until you hear the beep and see the light. It's also *possible*, which it was not on my A620, which had the horrible feature of a manual focus 'zoom' window that'd pop up, which zoomed in on the LCD's image and not the real image! However, if you buy a really fast lens, be prepared to be squinting through the viewfinder in the dark as you try to figure out what's sharp and what isn't.
- Holy cow, I can take bright and steady pix (probably courtesy of the F/1.4 and shake reduction) in the crummiest light imaginable.
- The flash beats the pants off my Canon A620's. I snapped a snapshot of my roommate on auto, just turned on and squeezed off a shot, and it came out bright and well-balanced, and it even filled in some of the rest of the room. Compare with the yellowy tunnel vision on the little Powershot.
- It's loud enough to startle my cat.
- Menu system is easy to use, and the screen is very bright and clear. However, there are a few too many button presses to dig around in the menus.
- Depth of field preview on the screen isn't as useful as I thought. Mostly because I was taking pictures of my cat, who likes to move around.
- The weird menu abbreviations don't bother me. (Set dst msr pt = 'auto-focus' point, for example. Dst msr = Distance Measure, aka focusing, because you focus based on how far away something is..)
- I'm afraid the pop-up flash will break someday. It clicks down fairly unsatisfyingly. Just a little 'tick'. I have a sneaky feeling that if it breaks, I would just tape it down and buy a real flash....
- You must manually white balance indoors. Also, you must FOCUS on what you are white balancing. Otherwise, you point the camera at the wall and hold down the shutter button and go, why isn't it saying, 'ok' !?!? That's somewhat irritating. However, after manually white balancing, everything is peachy.
The best thing I can say is, when I uploaded my trial pix of things on my desk and the cat, my roommate said, "wow, did you just take those? They look great!" That might be courtesy of the lens, however.