Shel Belinkoff mused: > > I'd be very interested in what others have to say ... From what's been > posted here, the DS may well be "good enough" and maybe even better than > anticipated. I suppose the answer depends on what you want from the > camera: features, picture quality, cost, adaptability to different lenses, > size. What's most important to you? For me it's adaptability to lenses
As far as I can tell the D and the DS are identical in this regards. In order to get them to work with your older lenses (or with manually selected apertures on newer lenses) you have to push a different button to meter, but the capabilites are no different between the two bodies. (If you were used to using body-mounted aperture controls I'd suggest the *ist-D, but I'm pretty sure that's not where you are coming from). > and picture quality, Same sensor. The DS supposedly has better conversion software, but as I assume you'll be using Adobe Camera Raw that won't be an issue. > with size coming in behind that, effectively the same > a decent viewfinder, Slightly more information is available in the D. But as far as the basic purpose of a viewfinder is concerned there's no difference. (Pentax may be trying to produce a cheap product, but they know better than to try and put a pentamirror viewfinder in a $800 body). > and the ability to use the camera as a P&S as well as a regular manual > focus SLR. > > Shel Either will work for you. The D has two P&S modes; fully automatic (with almost everything set to factory defaults), and "Program" mode (where a few more of the settings can be tweaked by the photographer). I believe the DS has comparable modes (Auto Picture vs. Picture). I generally set mine in Program mode initially, because I'm a great fan of the Hyper-Program mode where manually selecting a shutter speed instantly switches the camera into shutter priority (and similarly selecting aperture switches to aperture priority). The DS is a little less flexible in this regard, but that's only really a problem for those of us who got used to two body-mounted control wheels (on the PZ-1p in my case, although some other DSLR brands also offer this :-) Quite honestly I don't see any reason why the DS wouldn't serve your purpose at least as well as the D. You'd also get the benefit of a slightly larger LCD display, with better instant review abilities (immediate histogram display, and also out-of-range indicators).
