> From: "Don Sanderson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Here are my first impressions, please let me know if you SF owners agree: > > 1.) It's HEAVY (Has the AA battery grip) > 2.) It appears to be very sturdy and well built, other than the flash and > top cover. > 3.) It's BIG. > 4.) Autofocus is noisey enough to wake the dead. > 5.) It's HEAVY. > 6.) It seems to have a nice well rounded feature set except for MLU and DOF > preview. > 7.) Seems to be very close to spot focus and though slower focusing than > I'm used to seems to do fairly well with a good lens. > 8.) Though different than what I'm used to the controls seem well placed and > easily reached. > 9.) By the sound and feel of it, it seems that it would be reliable as a > sledge hammer. > 10.) Heck it could be USED as a sledge hammer! (Have I mentioned that it's > HEAVY?) > > Whatcha' Think? > > Don
I owned an SF-1 (original) once. My next camera was a Nikon, which IS a comment on the SF-1 and the statement it made about Pentax's ambitions in cameras. Yes, it was heavier than, say, an A-series camera, but it did have a built-in autowinder. Consider it against Super Program with Winder MEII, or LX with winder, and it's not so big and heavy. In absolute terms, it is not a HEAVY camera. I replaced mine with an F3, which is fairly heavy, and an F4, which is about as big and heavy as 35mm gets. OTOH the roughly contemporary Nikon N2020 might have been smaller, which is a little unusual in the normal Nikon/Pentax scheme of things. I wouldn't use it as a sledgehammer, either. Mine was a low-mileage hand-me-down from my grandfather, and it was nothing but trouble mechanically. Eventually I sold it to my repair shop for $15 to use as a parts camera because I was tired of bringing it to them for work. Maybe the -N version was better here than my original SF-1... AF was indeed noisy and slow (probably not aided by the first generation F lenses I had) but probably no worse than anything else of its day. My experiences with SF-1 AF kept me from seriously considering AF until almost 10 years later, by which point it had gotten a LOT better. Functionally, it wasn't at all bad. Unfortunately, most of the cameras of that era had some user interface issues as manufacturers wrestled with the best way to deliver new functions, and the SF-1 suffered from this a bit--I found the older cameras a little easier to run. Perhaps the worst feature of the SF cameras and F lenses was their appearance. Perhaps the shape was functional, but the color? DJE
