Well, as promised, I did a model shoot with the K-7 today. I did not get out
for my expedition of photographic proportion though, so to say I was a bit
unfamiliar with the camera would be an understatement. The model was very
understanding of my lacking of eptitude and I was getting the hang of the
camera by the end of the shoot.
So, where to start.
The K-7 is much smaller than the K10/K20. More so than what one would think.
It feels much more compact in the hand, And I found I was often over
reaching for the 4 way controller.
More on that fiasco in a moment.
I shot almost everything today with the 70/2.4, though I did some shooting
with the 55/1.4
The vertical grip is amazing. It balances perfectly with both the rather
petite Limited lens, and the much larger DA* lens. Shooting horizontal felt
a bit cramped, I often found myself getting lost on the 4 way switch and
pressing the liveview button instead.
Shooting vertically, the 4 way is a reach if I use my index finger on the
shutter, switching over to using my ring finger for pressing the shutter
worked a lot better.
Now, about the 4 way controller.
Unless I've missed something, the 4 way controller is broken. By default, it
provides access to the various functions, and one has to press the OK button
to get it to work as an AF point selector. Unfortunately, it won't bloody
stay as a focus point controller when set to that function. It takes every
possible opportunity to revert to function control.
Check your exposure with the instant review, when you go to take a picture,
you've lost access to focus point selection. Let the camera go to sleep, its
back to function select when you wake it up. Turn it off and back on, it is
on function control again. I believe I had it revert a few times just
because, and not for any reason I could fathom.
There is a little icon in the viewfinder that lights up to tell the operator
that the focus point controller is active, but I still found it to be really
annoying to have to be constantly resetting the function
Note to Pentax: Please put an option in the remembered settings to allow one
to choose what the 4 way switch defaults to.
The user mode is still broken as far as I am concerned. I would really like
the user mode to allow me to lock in a shutter speed and aperture
combination by programming it in manual mode.
It would also be nice to have multiple user setups available like the istD
had.
However, to get that I'm not willing to give anything else up.
I have my user mode set up to do HDR's, since I likely won't use it for
anything else.
Autofocus with the 70mm lens was quick and accurate enough most of the time.
The end focus point struggled a bit if I had the lights a bit far away, but
the more central AF points were quick to lock with very little hunting. I'm
quite certain that a timed test would show an improvement in AF speed with
this lens anyway. The 55/1.4 is another story. AF was about as fast as with
the K20.
The camera showed no focus inaccuracy under the incandescent modeling
lights, and the auto white balance is just about perfect.
I shot a grand total of 1584 images in just over 2.5 hours. That works out
to one shot every 5.5 seconds or some such. Other than the 4 way controller
issue, the camera was flawless for the entire shoot. The camera is quiet and
competent and very easy to use. There are a few major differences between it
and the K20 that I found a bit confusing. as an example, I wanted to check
the ISO before starting, and drew a complete blank for half a minute
regarding where to find it (the button conveniently marked ISO is a good
place to look).
Using an Extreme III 8gb card, the file writing light flashed for perhaps a
second and went out after taking a picture. The camera does write files much
quicker.
Interestingly, my DNG files are between 11mb and 12.5 mb.
This is about half the size of a K20 DNG, so I must presume that Pentax has
decided to compress them in camera. I hadn't heard anything about this
during pre release discussion.
Perhaps I slept through that class.
Oh and, the camera doesn't use power. I did the entire shoot with the
battery that came with it. After a while I kept expecting it to die on me,
but it just kept going. Almost 1600 shots on a single battery using AF
lenses, and I could have kept going.
I do keep my chimping to a minimum, but this is still pretty impressive.
The 70mm lens is one that I haven't used very often. I think that is about
to change though. It is a very pleasing little lens to use, and returns
really nice pictures. I have been finding manual focus under studio light to
be a struggle lately, even with the 85/1.4, so I elected to go with AF. The
lens performed flawlessly with the camera, I don't think it missed focus
once.
To compare the K20 & K-7 cameras on paper, the K-7 looks somewhat better.
The reality is that the K-7 is a much improved camera in most every respect.
Fix the 4 way controller problem and the K-7 is pretty much the perfect
camera.
William Robb
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