I've played with the K-1 for a couple of days. Not enough to actually
get any worthwhile photos with it, enough to do some of the basic
functions. Pretty much the equivalent to knowing where the bathrooms,
bedroom and dining room are. I've also did my first pass of RTFM.
Here are my observations and questions so far.
The 15-30 is a monster. Looking at photos you don't realize how big it
is. It is, however, nice to have that field of view with a lens that
much nicer than the samyang 8mm. The 15-30 isn't just big, it is dense,
and heavy. It's a large, solid, chunk of glass.
I am also gaining new appreciation for my Sigma 20/1.7. I now have a
fast, wide lens on a camera with a fast sensor. It also focuses down to
1:2 magnification, so there are some fun macro and perspective
opportunities there as well. I'm looking forward to some night sky and
astrotracer shots with it. (there are a few night sky shots in the
gallery listed below)
I find that the K-1 seems to fit my hands pretty close to perfectly.
Granted, I'm probably in the same league with certain reality TV stars
when it comes to small hands. Compared with the K-3, it's kind of like
going from the K-100 (or maybe K-x) to the K20. It's a bit bigger and
feels a bit more like a real camera. It is also solid and dense. It
feels like a flagship camera.
If I hadn't been shooting with K-5 and K-3s for so many years, I'd
probably be impressed by how quiet it is. For a full frame, it's not all
that obnoxious.
The shake reduction seems to work pretty well. The first picture I took
with it was hand held at 0.3 seconds, granted that was at 15mm, but it
was still reasonably sharp.
Does high iso noise reduction work on raw or just jpeg? I've got it
turned off anyways, I'd rather do that stuff on my laptop.
Expanded EV compensation and bracketing range, can bracket up to ± 5 ev
in some situations
In additive multi-exposure, is there a noise advantage of doing multiple
short exposures versus one long one? Doing two 30 second exposures
wouldn't trigger darkfield image like a 30 second exposure.
Ricoh image sync is of dubious usefulness. First connection with my
phone was fine, connecting to asus transformer was lumpy, then
connecting back to phone was a problem. It probably has its uses,
particularly when trying to photograph around corners.
Password is last four bytes of MAC address, the odds against that must
be four billion to one! Seriously though, since most of it shows up as
the SSID name, I just need to remember two characters to connect to it.
Tethering in lightroom, via USB does actually store the files on the SD
card, so I don't have to worry about a lost connection losing raw files.
Now that they have useful tethering, why did they go back to USB 2?
WTF Ricoh?
They have lousy options for the fx1/w button remapping. Too many of them
assume that you'd be shooting in JPEG. It is nice that many of them
only affect the next photo.
Why do they waste a four way button on jpeg processing nonsense? Why
can't that be the fx3 button?
I need to figure out what user modes to set and use.
What is this multiple white balance? Does it work with RAW?
I had difficulty with selecting focus point in live view, it may be set
to face recognition, couldn't find the menu to change it.
Just as the K-3 learned from mistakes with the K-5 button layout, the
K-1 corrects many of the shortcomings of the K-3. The focus point
select toggle button is in a better spot. The image review button is
back to where I can hit it with my right thumb and not need to use two
hands, and live view is way over on the left side. The only way I'll
accidentally hit live view now is when I space out and hit that button
instead of review out of finger memory.
On the subject of WTF, I set ISO to 100K or so and took handheld photos
of the big dipper. Yeah, they're a bit rough in terms of noise, but
hand held photos of stars, if not from the city, certainly not from way
out in the dark sky boonies. The tripod mounted photos at 100K worked a
lot better.
I'm adding shots to this set as I go. They are not meant to show off my
photographic skill, and certainly don't show my artistic ability. They
do give some idea of what the camera can do in incompetent hands as I
explore its features and abilities. It's more of what any idiot can do
with this camera, not what it can do in skilled hands.
My 18-250, 16-50 and 8mm lenses are totally unsuitable for use in full
frame mode.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157669544642765
To see them with exif data next to each photo
http://www.fluidr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157669544642765
--
Larry Colen [email protected] (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
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