[rawr]

Mind = blown.

How he managed to get such bad photos out of such a forgiving camera like the K-x is just beyond me. I mean within 30 minutes of buying the camera myself last year I was out there taking some great pictures with just the kit lens, without even trying.

Aside from that, it is simply a horribly written and technically incompetent review.

[tux]

The review does not tell you what lens is attached to the nikon D40 .... perhaps he is comparing a $2000 lens to a $100 lens ? To be fair he should really use a sigma or tamron of the model.

[snofox]

OTOH, the most recent copies of Shutterbug and Digital Photographer have glowing reviews of the K-x by photographers who know their stuff. The K-x gets so many excellent ratings in photog mags that it looks like it has attracted attention away from its big brother.

Still, it's nice to see Pentax getting lots of positive press lately.

[er1kksen]

so the reviewer set the camera up to fail? even without reading the manual? I couldnt imagine it comes setup like that from the factory. my K-7 certainly wasnt.

Wouldn't surprise me. I know I can't get a straight-from the camera jpeg with noise that bad at ISO 1600 at factory defaults if I tried. However, the author states that he did mess around with the camera settings, which doesn't require him to read the manual, and which doesn't necessarily mean he intentionally set it up for failure. He just happened to set it up in such a way that would produce excessive noise, using options that the D40 doesn't even have.

This image from the review seems to lend credence to my theory:



Note the D-range and shadow-correction settings.

[Erik]

Another cool thing is how the review basically says "haha I guess the pictures are crap because this kit lens is crap*, well, Pentax also makes a better 18-55." That's pretty clueless right there, maybe they should have taken 2 seconds to check that the "better" 18-55 has a metal lens mount and weather sealing but is otherwise the same design..?


* Not sure how a poor lens would make the pictures noisier?

[lithos]

Kim Brebach is a marketing professional whose experience spans over 3 decades in the IT industry. His interests include photography, cool technology, great music, theatre and books, wine and food, tennis and chess.

Reviewer's mini-bio. I saw that coming a mile away, and literally laughed out loud when I read it. Holy living-up-to-the-stereotype, Batman!

A f*cking "marketing professional...in the IT industry." Who likes "cool technology" With a review like that, I'm imagining a balding fifty-year-old who subscribes to Wired, but switched from telling everyone he was "in marketing" to "maketing in the IT industry" in 1999, when it suddenly became cool, to "in the IT industry" post-2001, when everyone associated marketing in the IT industry with those idiots who tried selling mail-order soufflés online. When posed with a computer-related question, I'll bet his stock and only answer is "My Macbook Pro never has a problem with that."

He shot this camera down before he even opened the box. My guess, since he's into, quote, "cool technology," he was immediately down on Pentax because, frankly, it's got bugger-all street cred. Lining up at the Mac store for the launch of the iPads, not one single hipter's gonna be able to tell how cool/how much money he's got. That's important, obviously. Nikon and Canon, however...

Not how he's sad that the one he got is "dull black." What, like all those Canons and Nikons and Olympii? Because, dammit, if he must have a non-cool-people-certified camera, he could at least have one that looks quirky.

Another choice quote:

"At home in front of my PC, I discovered that the standard USB cable I use for my Nikon and Canon cameras didn’t fit the Pentax – a real discord as I’d lent my SD-to USB-gizmo to a friend and had no way to pull any photos out of this camera."

"SD-to-USB gizmo" (hyphen relocated to where it belongs)? Quel la bite? Mr. It-Professional? And you're surprised some electronics products use different plugs? Every single sys admin, web designer and code monkey you've worked with turned off their monitor when you enter the room, didn't they, lest you be tempted to touch something.

Of course, what kind of camera review has "Marketing" as a prime consideration? Ok, no wonder Pentax gets panned, if that's a very important factor (after all, Cool-Tech-Man, there's no point in buying a gadget if other people don't know about it and can therefore judge your taste.)

But in a case like this, it's just admitting corruption.

Lives in Sydney, too. Go figure.

[MysteryOnion]

"At home in front of my PC, I discovered that the standard USB cable I use for my Nikon and Canon cameras didn’t fit the Pentax – a real discord as I’d lent my SD-to USB-gizmo to a friend and had no way to pull any photos out of this camera."

Sorry if I am touching cover ground... but don't that seem odd? Is this a new camera being tested or one that is a test/promo. I would suspect the camera was a test camera that had been passed around from reviewer to reviewer and that it had many setting off default. If it were new out of the box, you would have a cord to plug in and off load images.

[Agnostic]

I thought this new screen was included in the new K-x firmware? If it didn't show on the LCD there may have actually been something wrong with the camera's idiot detection unit.

[flyer]

Quel la bite?

??????????

[falconeye]

So at f/0.95, we capture 110% of available light?

To capture all available light, you need a lens as big as the universe. But not bigger.


Kim has now posted that he will receive a new testing unit.

Otherwise, the way Kim did his "test" is a nice and in itself interesting "K-x for dummies" experiment. However, his conclusion should have read: "yes, it is feasible to take bad images with a K-x" and everything would have been fine.

[Rondec]

I guess when Pentax sends the replacement camera to him, they should disable any features that he could possibly screw up. I have always been under the impression that features that were present in a camera that I don't use (things like HDR, filters, highlight correction) are just gravy. I don't mess with them because I don't like the way my photos look with them, but they certainly can be used to screw up your photos if you don't know what you are doing.

The same is true for modifying the Jpeg engine. If you can change sharpness, saturation, etc. then you can really screw up the photos that result. Maybe Canon/Nikon have it right. Give the entry level user (at least the entry level reviewer) fewer options to screw up and they'll take better photos over all.

[lithos]

To capture all available light, you need a lens as big as the universe. But not bigger.

HAHAHAHAHA! Well, it would be a shame to blow out the budget by making one bigger than is physically possible. I mean, kiss goodbye to next year's funding.

What I love is that CRK kindly sent him the camera to test, gratis, but then he basically insists customers shaft local companies and buy from Amazon.

I hope there's custom firmware on the next one, with sarcastic explanations for everything, and Manual mode disabled, bringing up the message "You're obviously too much of an idiot to use this."

??????????

Parisian told me it's French for "What the cock?" Might be Parisian slang...

[Peter Zack]

This is one time when I wish my Moderation permissions could transcend sites.

This makes DPR look objective.....

But what really gets me is that the owners/editors of the site allowed this crap. Did they read it? I think not at all. Since I'm working on a review of this camera for my own site (that will take 6-8 weeks to finish) I can say that this is pure laziness on his/her part to not read the manual.

The High ISO shot is underexposed by more than a full stop. EXIF data shows it was taken with a K-x. LR shows it's -1.10 Ev

Forget it, I'm so pi$$ed off I'm going to argue with someone in the Politics forum......

[Peter Zack]

You guys in Oz should point that out. I'd be emailing them to say "how's the sales going since they don't push customers your way". They should never, ever loan that site another camera of any brand.


I bet a couple dozen well written letters to them would make them rethink their policy to thet site.

[falconeye]

I'm imagining a balding fifty-year-old

He's not balding.


I think this guy is smarter than the review makes us believe.

He just didn't take the job of writing a review report seriously. It reminds me of a returning column in a (German) manager magazine where a manager-kind of person tests yet another gizmo, like iPhone, K-x, Solar garden lamp, ...

And me too, I don't like the Micro-B type USB cable. However, I wouldn't have mentioned it in a review report. And btw, he missed to look into the K-x box to grab the proper cable...


P.S.
In Kim's own words:

I found this all a bit hard to swallow

[Source: - Get The Picture]