As some of you may remember, some five months ago I decided that the K3iii, while a nice camera, wasn't tempting enough to get me to spend that amount of money on a new APS-C camera body. I was already finding that carrying a camera bag with my K5, the 60-250, and a selection of other items (generally one or other of the 16-50 or 50-135, and maybe the 50/1.4) was getting tiring by the end of the day, so I was looking for a way to lighten the load. I'd looked at the Olympus bodies, and was leaning towards either the M5 or possibly the M1, when Olympus decided to drop the price of the M1X by 40%, making it only a little more expensive than the M1 (and $300 less than Pentax were asking for the K3) for a body that was specifically tailored for what I was most interested in - Motorsports or wildlife photography.
So I jumped, and picked up the M1X and the 40-150/2.8 zoom (which gave me pretty much the same field of view as the 60-250, which had become my most-used lens). I haven't done a great deal of photography in the five months that have elapsed since then, but it's all been with the M1X. I've just about become accustomed to the fact that almost all the controls work exactly the way the Pentax controls don't (I have to turn the dials in the opposite direction for many functions, the assignment of the two thumbwheels on the body to control shutter and aperture has the two functions interchanged, the lens release button is on the other side of the mount, etc., etc.) Fortunately, though, the M1X is amazingly reconfigurable - most of the vast number of buttons spread over the body can be re-assigned to different functions (and there's an easy way to swap the functions on those two thumbwheels), One thing I have found out, though, is that it's a little too easy to get yourself stuck in a corner. With the Pentax bodies all you have to do to reset the camera to a known state is to turn it off and on again. The M1X, though, remembers the state it was it when you turned it off, and goes back to that state when you turn it on again (although there's probably a way to change that behaviour, too). Last weekend I decided I was going to stick with the lighter system. I knew I wanted something wider than 40mm, but I wasn't sure whether to go for the 12-40/2.8 or the 12-100/4. I eventually decided to go for the 12-100, and add a 2x TC to use with the 40-150 to give me a two-lens system of 12-100/4 and 80-300/5.6 (roughly comparable to a range of 17-425 on my K5 - giving up 1mm at the wide end, but gaining a little more reach than the 350mm I got with the 60-250 & a 1.4x TC). -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-le...@pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
