William, Does the 4-way controller operation override the setting of the AF point selection switch, or does it work as advertised only in point-selection mode?
Jostein 2009/7/7 William Robb <[email protected]>: > 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 > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- http://www.alunfoto.no/galleri/ http://alunfoto.blogspot.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
