So a few weeks ago I sold off all my Sony gear (the A850 and a few lenses) in anticipation of the coming Pentax full-frame. This was before the announcement of the latest delay of the Pentax full-frame, of course. So after the announcement of the delay I thought I should pick up an extra camera body just to have a backup on hand. I was pretty surprised to see that even the K-5 body is holding its value better than I'd expected. But I found I could get a K-01 mirrorless on ebay for around $250.00 so I thought "why not?" Same sensor as my K-5 in an even smaller body. Might even be worth keeping as a collector's item (there were big headlines in the design world a couple of months ago when Marc Newson got hired by Apple to work on some undisclosed major project).
So, after a couple of week's use, here are my initial impressions: * Build quality: Wow. Feels very solid and well made. * Seems much smaller than the K-5 even though you wouldn't expect that much difference from the measurements. * Now that my near vision has become a bit worse with age I tend to carry my reading glasses with me all the time, so lack the of viewfinder isn't as irksome as I'd expected. * Great for use when traveling by motorcycle: During a quick stop for photos the lack of viewfinder isn't an issue because you couldn't use a viewfinder with a helmet on anyway ;-) * Ergonomics and user interface are really excellent. My only nit is that the shutter release button isn't as easy to find (in some situations) as I'd prefer. Perhaps it's just a matter of getting to know the camera a bit better. * It's a great unobtrusive camera for street shooting. * It's an excellent match for the 21mm Limited. * Contrast detect AF works much better than I'd expected. I've left it on "face detect" AF mode and that seems to work even on subjects with no faces in them. * My only real complaint is that the auto-bracketing function makes the camera take all 3 shots with a single press of the shutter button rather than letting me choose the moment for each shot individually. (The K-5 lets me choose which way auto-bracketing works.) Generally I'm pretty amazed at what you can get from this camera, considering its low price on the used camera market. -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.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.
