Some friends were playing (actually running a pro-jam) at a local BBQ
last night. One of them asked me to take photos with his camera, a D810.
The first thing that I noticed was that the controls on it are not
intuitive. That's not to say that they are not logical, but they were
very difficult to figure out. I was able to muddle through and figure a
few things out. A couple things (like enabling the RGB histogram) I was
able to find enough hints on the web to do. And a couple things (like
exposure compensation on the flash) I asked him how to do when he wasn't
on stage.
IIRC, the lenses in his bag that I played with were:
50/1.8
35/1.8
85/1.8
28-200 (4-6.3?)
Some thoughts on the experience:
Familiarity with the equipment is far more important than actual camera
performance in any sort of challenging light. At first, I couldn't even
figure out how to put it in manual mode, change composition, or find the
RGB histogram so that I could see what channels I was blowing out. It
was kind of like trying to drive an autocross in a Ferrari after four
shots of whisky, while wearing snowshoes.
I haven't seen anything except on the back of the camera, but the
autofocus seems to leave the Pentax in the dust.
Judging by the back of the camera previews, the fullframe sensor high
ISO performance is significantly better than the K-5 or K-3.
Once I got the flash under control, it may have had better exposure
control than on the Pentax. It's hard to tell, it was a challenging
room, and I was using the flash primarily for fill, once I was able to
turn it down.
Even once I learned how to use many of the basic controls, many of the
basic operations seem to be a lot better on the Pentax than the Nikon.
I suspect that that would hold true even once I was really familiar and
comfortable with the Nikon UI. Mind you, I'm not saying that Pentax has
a good UI, it just seems to suck a bit less than Nikon.
One nice thing about using someone else's camera is that I got all of
the fun of taking the photos, but I don't need to do the work of sorting
and processing them.
Although, it would be interesting to get the raw files of the ones that
did turn out to see what I could do with them in Lightroom.
This confirms something that I've been thinking about lately. When the
K-1 comes out, I will have to take a good hard look comparing its
performance (including ease of use) with that of equivalent Nikons.
Taking full advantage of the big sensor will require significant
investment in new glass over time, and that would be the time to fully
understand my options.
--
Larry Colen [email protected] (postbox on min4est)
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