Tuesday, November 25. 2008
Digital SLR Upgrade
At my friend's birthday party this past weekend, one of the people there had a Pentax K100D. After playing around with it for a little bit, I sadly was reminded of probably how Pippin felt when touching the Palantir (sorry, non-LOTR readers  ) as the overwhelming urge to upgrade my Pentax D-SLR strongly took hold.I have had my trusty Pentax ist*DS since 2004 and, thousands of photos later, it is quite safe to say that I have gotten a great deal of use from it (and will probably be keeping it as a backup unit). After spending quite a bit of time comparing (via reviews and forums threads) the Pentax K20D, Canon 40D and the Nikon D300. After weeding out the fan-boy rants and threads, the overall general consensus seemed to be that all three models would give you stunning photos; it boiled down to both cost and the type of photography that one would be doing. For sports-centric photography, the slant seems to be towards Canon (or Nikon), both for their lenses in the 300mm+ range and their fast 6+fps speed. However, for actual detail, Pentax was on par with both the equivalent Canon and Nikon models (or ahead of them, depending on which review you believe). For me, it basically boiled down to: "Is the occasional sports photography that I do worth tossing out all of my Pentax lenses and Pentax flash?" and the answer came back "No".  Overwhelmingly I do much more family and outdoor/landscape shots, so the extra detail that I get with the 14.6MP Pentax (to say nothing of a weather-sealed body) makes more sense (even on top of the being able to still use all of my lenses). So, thanks to the goodness of Amazon Prime, I had my new Pentax K20D in short order. A couple of the features that I fell immediately in love with was the Auto Focus Adjustment to fine-tune some older Pentax lenses so they’d autofocus perfectly (settings for up to 20 lenses can be saved). Also, the K20D’s new image-comparison function allows me to call any two images up on the LCD screen, examine them side-by-side at up to 32x magnification, and cull bad images to free up memory-card space - nice!! I am still fooling around with the body-based shake reduction feature as well as the many others, so a more in-depth review will be posted shortly. (of course, I also happened to come across some very nice Pentax-centric PhotoBlogs (here and here) in the research process; with the Pentax official site having some stunning photos taken with the K20D). |  |
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
Add Comment
