I had a 7-hour gap between landing at Haneda and going out at Narita, so I managed to spend a couple hours in Shinjuku; had to pick up some crafty stuff at Okadaya for my wife, but went by the Pentax Forum and one of the big camera stores (BIC this time).
Pentax Forum is a sad place these days, crammed in a 2nd-rate basement mall, staff not interested in interaction, tiny little gallery. There's a cool display case with tons of lenses, including the 645 and 67 sets. But if you're going to Tokyo, don't bother finding the place (which is a nontrivial exercise). The camera store was more fun. They had a display of all the high-end small cameras in a row, and I got to fool with an OlyPen and a Panasonic G1 and and LX3 and a Sigma DP2 and a Ricoh GRD2. Lots of cool obscure lenses. Prices high by Canadian standards, but then they had at least one of everything right there on the shelf. Gaijin-friendly. Conclusions: The OlyPen and PanaG1 are just not enough smaller than the K2000/K7 form factor to be interesting. I'd come from a couple of days walking around Shimane prefecture (nobody's ever heard of it, but it's visually appealing) with my K20+DA21-Limited welded to my hand, and a K7 would have been better but one of the new little guys wouldn't have been enough better to be worth the trouble. Now if you're in a situation where you need a tele/zoom, one of the smaller bodies with their cute little big lenses might be a winner. BTW, that 21mm limited is just an insanely great walk-around-somewhere-you've-never-been lens. The LX3 looks like being about as cool as everyone says, they had 2 on display but were out of stock. If the big camera marts in Shinjuku can't keep the sucker in supply, what hope is there for the rest of the world? I suspect the new Canon S90 eats their lunch (assuming it's good, and I bet it is), because Canon knows how to build and ship product. Cheers, T -- 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.
