Life With a K100D, pt 1

[thekevinmonster]

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.

[Saralonde]

Originally Posted by thekevinmonster

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.

A lens may help, but it's the photographer imagination and creativity that determines the image .

Enjoy the camera!

[Scottie137]

Originally Posted by thekevinmonster

- 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.

Congrats on the K100! I have had mine for about 6 months and love it more every day. If you shoot RAW, the WB issues aren't such a big deal. An external flash does wonders for the K100, though the P-TTL ones are currently fairly pricey. I am jealous of your 50mm, hope to have one toward the end of the year. Finally, Post up some pics!

[ovidius]

Hi thekevinmonster.

I have a Pentax K10D and I can tell you that I am very happy with it. A big advantage, from my point of view, is the "sealed" body that allows me to shot in bad atmospheric conditions. I have used the camera in storms and flood rain and thank God and the lads from Pentax, i didnt have any problems. The shake reduction is also a great thing but one feature that i keep seeing as a big advantage is the Shutter and Aperture Priority (TAV). Basically you select both the shutter speed (front dial) and aperture (rear dial) and the camera calculates the appropriate ISO sensitivity. Great thing...pity I am not a good photographer to avail of all these features but with the help of all the users here, i hope I will improve



Regards

Ovidiu

P.S By the way..A big hello to all of you. This is my first post.

[thekevinmonster]

Well... Here's my old camera, posing for the new one:

EDIT: uhm, help? Suddenly my flickr links aren't working?



The shake reduction's nice. It helped get a nice shot even at 1/30. You may notice the slight chromatic aberration or whatever. That's because I shot this wide-open on my desk, under terrifically bad CF lighting.

Here's an outdoor 'macro' shot with the 50mm:

[stevesutt89]

love the macro shot!

I was wondering, since this thread is titled "Life With a K100D, pt 1" is there likely to be a pt 2?. Because if so, i for one whold be keenly interested as i'm currently looking at buying a K100D(...sometime in the next few months)....thanks for this reveiw though, it was quite helpful!

[thekevinmonster]

There is going to be one! Right now!

Here's Pt 1.5. Just some comments...:

- The kit lens is a valuable resource. I just bought one. It's a little soft, but it's cheap, and it's not THAT soft. It's slow, so you're probably going to be using the flash indoors. Also, it has 'zoom creep'. That means that the lens will extend/retract if you hold the camera at a steep angle or vertical (pointing up or down).

- Full Manual is pretty easy, although there's only one dial for adjusting settings. Additionally, some settings are a little irritating to turn on and off, such as the Depth of Field Preview (optical vs digital). It's definitely a huge step up in terms of learning the basics compared to just pushing a button and hoping the camera does what you want.

- Plugging the camera into your PC will eat the batteries. I don't know why. You'd think the camera could be powered by USB power, but nope. My P&S did the same thing.

- If you wear glasses, the viewfinder's display becomes difficult to read in bright sunlight because light will get in between you and the viewfinder. (I can't use a magifying viewfinder thing without glasses because I have rather bad astigmatism and have to wear glasses or else rectangles turn into slanty trapezoid things.)

- The focusing screen is not very good. It's not bad, it's just a piece of ground glass. no rangefinder prism, no weird little magnified circle of ground glass stuff. Apparently, you can buy replacement screens from some company that feature all kinds of goodies. I am scared of doing that. (I'm comparing to my dad's old Nikon SLR, which has the prism and stuff. It's very easy to focus.)

- The auto-focus system still is super awesome for manual focus. *twist* *beep!*. One downside is that you end up kind of waffling back and forth, since invariably it beeps and you keep twisting a little.

- The LCD cannot be used to judge exposure; you need the histogram and bright highlights turned on. The LCD is very high contrast; your pictures will 'POP' on it, when in reality they're being saved as neutral toned jpegs (or RAW).


If I was going to say, right now, whether or not I was happy with the K100D, I would say, "I am very happy I bought this camera." It certainly doesn't have the spontaneity of my little P&S, since I have to haul it out of the bag and take off the lens cap... but the pictures come out uniformly higher-quality and I vastly enjoy using it more.

The shake reduction alone is an awesome feature. I've taken a few shots at 1/8s or slower where they wouldn't have come out at all otherwise.

I'd also recommend the 50mm F/1.4 lens, especially if you take a lot of shots in weird light. It's not too expensive, and while kind of 'long', and soft (especially with regards to the chromatic aberration as you can see in the pic of my old camera) you can take pictures in near-dark if you can hold the camera steady.

[mattdm]

Originally Posted by thekevinmonster

- Wow, the lens I bought is loud. (Pentax SMC-P FA 50mm F/1.4) zzzzip! Zzzzzip!

The lens is part of it, but mostly it's the motor in the camera body and the mechanism of transferring that power. The new ultrasonic ring-motor lenses will be a lot quieter, but pretty much all current lenses will sound like

- 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.

Yeah, it sure would be nice if the firmware would automatically switch to manual focus when clicking to set the white balance.

[brianwahl]

I have the K100d (since about January), and I LOVE it. I came from an old Canon PowerShot G2.

I like the shake reduction, too. I can get sharp shots down to even 1/10 most of the time (if I'm towards the wide end of my lens).

Great photos, by the way.

[Singalong]

I have had my K100D for just over a year now, just had it all checked out under the warranty not that there was much wrong- just to be sure, works good too. takes real good photos with my 28-300 Sigma lens, they now make the 70-300 I notice instead. I have nothing bad to sat about this camera,
good on you for getting it and it is the cheapest all round. Cheers.