Originally posted by twitch LOL, yep, and probably by a high school kid living with his parents, whose only photography knowledge comes from forum surfing.
LOL, but to not make the story any bigger than it really is, I am 36 years old, studied physics, got married and together we have two lovely young daughters, currently living in Japan (raised in the Netherlands and for sure going back to our own home at the end of this work assignment).
- A little over 10 years ago I bought a SLR (Canon with functionality to adjust focus point automatically to where I looked within the OVF - on limitted matrix layout, so actually didn't make much sense either way) with the kit zoom lens as well as a 75-300 mm zoom.
- Over time I also owned about 5 compact P&S camera's, but until my LX3 I wasn't satisfied with most of the results.
- But now I want a little more (also because the LX3 is always at the bottom of my wife's bag, in good looking leather casing and too small to find fast....).
- My father's camera was cool and the Pentax story did sounded pretty good to me.
With my technical background (including optics) I did indeed read myself into the tools and also into the applications (totally different story), but practically speaking I am for sure a newbie. But sometimes it is better to not have a established opinion before making a decision.
Did you ever really notice on what reasoning most camera's are sold? Listening to a sales guy in the shop or people having experience with only one brand can be pretty misleading.
One thing I don't understand about Pentax. They know about the SDM failure stories going around, how can they continue asking premium prices and not given 10 year world wide transferable free repair of structural design / manufactoring issue?
- It at least combines very badly with the name they build with the quality MF primes.
Besides the kit lens(es) and some second-hand primes, I am in the market for portrait prime and/or zoom.
- Optically I have the impression the Pentax DA*50-135 mm F2.8 is superieur, but mainly because of this SDM story icw higher price I am leaning to the Sigma 50-150 mm F2.8.
- But I also like a fast automatic focus prime, but don't know 200% sure yet which focal length... (I will try out the manual focus primes first)
- The fact that you effectively cannot correct back/front focussing issues on a K-x (all lenses get same correction) is also an irritation they to my opinion should fix very soon (firmware to enable manual selection at turn-on is OK-ish). Asking customers to upgrade to a much larger K-7 for this doesn't make any sense. Oh, the K-7 has more nice features and I can dream up a whole wishlist for the successor of the K-x as well, but besides this it actually already seems to be more thatn good enough for me. Why would Pentax not offers such containment?
As far as I can see next to its flagship camera also a good cheap entry level DSLR of course icw a nice and robust lens line-up is crucial for Pentax.
So back to the automatic focus zoom lenses, I found it very difficult to compare the Pentax line up with Nikon/Canon. To my impression price, body features (incl test results with kit-lenses vs price) and prime availabilty are the main subjects to differentiate on, the Pentax limitted series (as well as the old manual primes - good support like focus confirmation on manual lenses is very smart move) are in favor of Pentax.
But why are Pentax AF Zooms better than those from Nikon and Canon?
- Given SDM failures and back focus issues that cannot be corrected on K-x
Sorry, but this post might be slightly of topic...
Last edited by JoepLX3; 09-07-2010 at 08:03 PM.
Reason: Layout + last summary line + off topic remark