You have to take the Q for what it is, and use its characteristics to their advantage.
It is small and light with equally small and light interchangeable lenses. 1" and MFT cameras are as small, but the equivalent lenses aren't. If weight and bulk is important the Q is unbeatable.
Its toy-like appearance is much less intimidating than a big DSLR. Its quiet leaf shutter (or silent electronic shutter) is also less obnoxious.
Its small sensor offers much greater depth of field than larger sensors. Great for table-top or macro work, not so good for portraits. If you can use this feature, it is a good camera for you. If you must have shallow depth of field it is not. You can get wide aperture C-mount lenses in the 25—50mm range that will give a shallow depth of field.
Its extreme crop factor does make it great for small telephoto set-ups, but the extremely high resolution of its sensor requires excellent optics–you will really see how much resolution your adapted lens has. I have used old Canon rangefinder LTM lenses that work well: a 100mm becomes a 460mm that is very pocket-able when broken down. I have a 300mm mirror lens that becomes 1400mm!
It is the
best camera body for using adapted c-mount lenses. There is a whole universe of these, many of them give a unique "look" to your images. They are great for macro. Unfortunately, these lenses have become more expensive as their use by videographers has escalated the demand for them. It is the
only body that works without vignetting with d-mount lenses. It works great with Pentax 110 lenses.
The Q's used to be a good value but the prices have recently gone up, I got an open-box Q-S1 with 02 a couple of years ago for less than $250, as well as a lightly used Q7 with 02 for $225, now you are looking at $400 for the Q-S1 combo and over $300 for the Q-7. That is still less than Nikon's 1" sensor cameras, and the Q lenses still generally cost much less than MFT or the Nikon 1 lenses.
There are numerous point and shoots that are as good or better than the Q, but the built-in zooms don't go as wide as the Q's 08, or the long ends aren't as fast as the 06. The various Sony RX cameras are much more expensive and have problems with dust on the sensor that need a technician to clean.
If you want a camera that does all the thinking for you, you might not like the Q. If you like to experiment and look at things in a different way, the Qs are great. As far as "image quality" goes, the Q is very close to 35mm FF film—even high ISO images are similar to high ISO film stocks, with a film-like grain pattern.
The "dumb" PK adapters work well with older "M" and "A" lenses, you just set the f-stop on the lens and then turn the ring on the adapter to stop down before exposure, just like old pre-set lenses. The Pentax adapter has a scale, but you need to do some chimping to get it set right with DA lenses. Zoom lenses don't adapt well to the Q, you would have to manually set the SR and the IQ of a zoom is generally not as good as a prime, you would really see it..
Last edited by Unregistered User; 11-02-2017 at 09:24 AM.
Reason: typo, more info