A while back I picked up a micro 4/3 kit to carry on bike rides. It is indeed a LOT smaller and easier to carry than even the APS Pentax kit. As things settle out these days, I've been doing most of my photography with it, because it seems the only time I take many photos is when I'm on a bike ride. As an aside, riding around the inland empire really makes me appreciate the Santa Cruz mountains as well, particularly anything at all off road is a very thorny issue.
While a lot of the intuitive nature of a user interface is simply just being used to it, and I do appreciate certain aspects of the touch screen of the Gx9, I'm having a real problem getting used to it, finding what I need to do buried under 7 layers of menus. When I couldn't get the 5-button dial on the back to do anything other than change the focus point, I ended up giving up, and just doing a factory reset. Now I can't get it to change the focus point, but the touch screen works well for that. In terms of user experience, while EVFs have come a long way, this one is still a very, very long way from the optical viewfinder on my k-1 or my k-3 iii. Granted, for manual focusing particularly in limited light, it is hard to beat an OVF with focus peaking. I love me those high pass filters. I'm also gaining an appreciation of why so many small cameras are being wiped out by smart phones. I recently got a Pixel 8 pro, and while I have some gripes with its user interface, the image quality of it is usually nearly as good, often better than, the image quality of the micro 4/3. I realize that this isn't an entirely fair comparison, between a brand new, bleeding edge, top of the line smart phone and a micro 4/3 that was released 5 years ago, using "somewhat better than kit" zoom lenses. However, there is just something about the image quality of the raw files, particularly at anything past base ISO, they have very little dynamic range, and are often quite noisy. To be fair, the noise reduction in the latest lightroom can do wonders with those files, particularly on the sky. At some point, I'll need to look a bit more closely at some of the OLY bodies, likely the EM5-iii, but even used they're rather pricey to pick up "just to see what they're like", and it's not like there are any camera stores around. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from ret13est -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-le...@pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
