[aslyfox]

Of course you are correct. But if you have interest in photography, you will need to spend something to get started. Of course everything is relative. . . .

When you post a question on the Forum though, with regard to gear, you are getting free advice. That advice is coming from a lot of different places and people with different experience levels. It is awfully easy to spend other people's money and to try to stretch it into gear that is higher than what they are asking for. . . .

yet I can understand the frustration that some might feel when they state what they hope to spend

and then some responses talk about gear which costs well above the amount stated.

I know that this has occurred but I have never seen, in these forums, anyone degrading the equipment that someone chooses to buy or use

Responses meant to educate about gear done correctly does not do that.

_____________________

life makes us prioritize and only some are able to buy the most expensive equipment due to other demands on their ability to spend on a hobby

since I live in the US, the forum's marketplace is quite active and I have been able to find good equipment for good prices and gotten lucky buying equipment elsewhere at good prices and on sale

[Jonathan Mac]

It does happen here too - people post what they want, their budget, maybe a size or weight limit too and as more people post, the gear they suggest gets further and further from what the OP asked for. Of course, on Pentax forums you won't find people saying you need to switch to a different brand unless it's clear that said alternative brand offers a solution that really is a better fit than what can be found from Pentax.

If you're going to shoot Pentax then you need to learn to ignore what fan-boys say about switching to another brand. I would say the average CaNikon shooter knows less about photography and less about what's available from different brands than the average Pentaxian, simply because so many people shoot CaNikon just because they're the most well-known brands and haven't given it any more thought than that.

[Rondec]

yet I can understand the frustration that some might feel when they state what they hope to spend

and then some responses talk about gear which costs well above the amount stated.

I know that this has occurred but I have never seen, in these forums, anyone degrading the equipment that someone chooses to buy or use

Responses meant to educate about gear done correctly does not do that.

_____________________

life makes us prioritize and only some are able to buy the most expensive equipment due to other demands on their ability to spend on a hobby

since I live in the US, the forum's marketplace is quite active and I have been able to find good equipment for good prices and gotten lucky buying equipment elsewhere at good prices and on sale

I suppose.

There is a disconnect between buyers and sellers. My brother-in-law sells used vehicles and he constantly deals with people who think they should be able to get what they want (low mileage, relatively new model, top end make) for a low price. He has to gently inform them that they have to move on their expectations -- either accept older, higher mileage or pay more.

I don't think that people here disparage any gear. A great photo is a great photo, whether shot with a *ist D or a K-1 II. At the same time, sometimes when people post threads asking for help choosing gear to purchase, if their budget is really tight, that is going to severely limit the options they have. Making a comment like "If you could stretch your budget to 300 dollars you could get a nice K5 and kit lens..." isn't disparaging other, cheaper options, it is just saying that in the view of the poster, maybe the K5 is a worthwhile camera in comparison to, say, a *ist DL or K10.

[aslyfox]

. . . Making a comment like "If you could stretch your budget to 300 dollars you could get a nice K5 and kit lens..." isn't disparaging other, cheaper options, it is just saying that in the view of the poster, maybe the K5 is a worthwhile camera in comparison to, say, a *ist DL or K10.

that is a good way to do as I tried to described instead of saying " you're crazy to want ' x ' you should spend more money for ' y ' "

I might use the comparison tool to show that although the *st DL or K 10 is a good camera for the price, the newer K 5 has these advantages and perhaps it might be wise to try to see if one could be found close to the budget range

Pentax *ist DL vs. Pentax K-5 vs. Pentax K10D - Pentax Camera Comparison - PentaxForums.com

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Last edited by aslyfox; 02-24-2020 at 08:03 AM.

When I was a kid, I used to complain about the way people do things; one day, my father said, "Danny, you need to realize that other people aren't like you, you have to be patient with them because they're limited, and they don't know they're limited." (He was good at educating me about my own limitations with that style of argument.)

As to the present issue, I'd suggest that most people aren't really very good at reading, and like most things, some folks are really good, some are really bad, and most are average. They miss stuff, even when it's clearly and well written. I'm pretty good at reading, but I miss stuff and say stupid things because of what I'd thought was said rather than what was actually said.

Secondly, they are limited by their own perspective on things. It's like someone who's only means of seeing the world is through a telephoto lens, and he can't conceive of being able to see at 24mm, much less 11. Consider Plato's "cave" analogy, or the ordinary people stuck in "The Matrix", or, as in "The Sixth Sense", where the kid said, "They don't know they're dead."

And the worst aspect of all this: if you don't think the way they do, you represent a threat to their sense of self.

By the way, someone's advertised what looks like a nice deal on a KP and an 18-135 lens on the "marketplace" today, $700 for the pair.

True the initial cash outlay of a few hundred bucks sounds high for some folks.

But it is a one time cost.
...

That's a good point - I often make a comparison to things like gasoline or heating fuel, where you have to buy the same thing every so often, and where the pennies add up over time. It's worth it in the long run to know where the least expensive gas station is, or the grocery store that has the stuff you regularly buy at lower prices. But you're probably not going to need to buy a new camera every week.

[photoptimist]

Some of the disparagement of gear comes from people's dashed expectations of image quality, ease of use, and keeper rate.

Someone who expects to get great shots of every great play of their child's night-time high school football games by using a K-10D and a $100 manual focus Chinese knock-off mirror lens is going to be very disappointed initially. And the person who has tried this combination might well conclude "the gear sucks" and say so to someone looking for a "cheap good" 500mm telephoto lens for sports, birds in flight, etc.

Yes, you can take great photos with anything. Even the K-10D + cheap manual mirror lens can get great sports photos (or BIF) if one develops mad skillz in pre-focusing and anticipating the shot (plus dialing back the expectations on image noise and sharpness). The essence of a great sports photograph isn't in being able to count the player's eyelashes but in capturing the energy and emotion of the event. Done right, a little blur and grain can even intensify the quality.

But if someone expects Sports Illustrated quality photos right out of the box with $ gear instead of $$$$ gear, they will probably be disappointed and that can lead to disparagement.

[photolady95]

By the way, someone's advertised what looks like a nice deal on a KP and an 18-135 lens on the "marketplace" today, $700 for the pair.

Since he bought my K-5, with shutter count below 7,000, and for a lot less than $700 , perhaps you all can help him look for lenses to collect. I'm shipping the camera out today.

[normhead]

Cross posted....

My F 70-210 was listed at $60, but Tess chatted the guy up and got it for $35. MY 35-80 cost me $80. My FAJ 18-35 cost $100. A full working 18-210 kit for $215. With Pentax, you don't necessarily have to pay to get in the game. Those were the lenses I initially used with my K-1 until I scratched together enough for a DFA 28-105. So you can pay a lot for lenses, but you don't really have to. Especially if you have a Tess.

I know you're thinking those aren't the best lenses, but almost all my images are displayed reduced in size. So even the worst of them, the FAJ 18-35 produces great images at 3840x2160. You can't pixel peep an image once it's reduced in size and it will look sharp if you do.

And you still get the K-1 dynamic range which is what I bought the camera for.
Know a lot of people say DR is overrated... and like everything else it is, until it isn't.

K_1 and FA 35-80, it would have been better taken with my 28-105? Ya, uh huh, sure it would have.

[WorksAsIntended]

I have seen the F70-210 for as low as 15€.
The only time I find it limiting, despite of course when a faster aperture would be needed, is when shooting against a lot of sunlight.
I nearly becomes milky in those situations.
Then again, I am really not a standard tele user and maybe just don't care enough about it. Sure, I liked shooting nature with really big tele primes, but this is not my usual kind of photography and most times I prefer perspectives of lower focal lengths.
Last week I had one of the rare occasions I used the tele, and it performed just fine. 15€ is a great deal on that lenses for sure.

[aslyfox]

Since he bought my K-5, with shutter count below 7,000, and for a lot less than $700 , perhaps you all can help him look for lenses to collect. I'm shipping the camera out today.

as usual, lots of lenses listed in the Marketplace

The Pentax Marketplace | Buy & Sell Pentax Cameras and Lenses (United States) - PentaxForums.com

however will Forum Members suggest how the OP might spend his limited funds?

you betcha

it's what a lot of us like to do

[AggieDad]

What you call budget prices there can be a tremendous amount of money for others.
This is exactly what I ment in my post earlier. Reading this thread, the forum perspective seems to be budget ~ $300-$500.
There is no more truth to this being budget than "only" going for a D850 with the Nikon 2.8 trinity instead of a D5(6) with the comming 120-300 2.8 replacing the 70-200.

Let's say this another way as you seem to have problems with my (and others') use of the word budget. I understand. My wife and I are retired schoolteachers and don't spend our money carelessly.

What I am trying to do is get across that it is possible to acquire high quality equipment at incredibly reasonable prices. We would all like to have a K-1ii with with a cabinet full of lenses all for a couple hundred dollars. However the fundamental truth is that good camera equipment comes with a cost and that cost has lower limits. If you want to get below that floor – and who doesn't? – then I suspect your real hobby will end up being web-searching for bargains that are either non-existent or few-and-far-between.

[Ian Stuart Forsyth]

At the same time, sometimes when people post threads asking for help choosing gear to purchase, if their budget is really tight, that is going to severely limit the options they have. Making a comment like "If you could stretch your budget to 300 dollars you could get a nice K5 and kit lens..." isn't disparaging other, cheaper options, it is just saying that in the view of the poster, maybe the K5 is a worthwhile camera in comparison to, say, a *ist DL or K10

They could also save money going with the slightly more expensive combo, I know from experience that going cheaper many not be the cheapest at end of the day if you are not happy with the less expensive option if at a later date you are unhappy and will upgrade. For me this was the FAJ 70-300 if I had saved the money from that and put that towards the lens I final went with I would have been better off and saved in the long run

[WorksAsIntended]

Let's say this another way as you seem to have problems with my (and others') use of the word budget. I understand. My wife and I are retired schoolteachers and don't spend our money carelessly.

What I am trying to do is get across that it is possible to acquire high quality equipment at incredibly reasonable prices. We would all like to have a K-1ii with with a cabinet full of lenses all for a couple hundred dollars. However the fundamental truth is that good camera equipment comes with a cost and that cost has lower limits. If you want to get below that floor – and who doesn't? – then I suspect your real hobby will end up being web-searching for bargains that are either non-existent or few-and-far-between.

Having a problem is too strong of a word choice, I did not mean to be this resolutly. I personally also feel a k5-II being a "budget camera" and a D1XM3 being a very expensive camera. I also agree that there can be a lot of "bargains" for people in a money state as the majority in this forum seem to be and it is totally fine to call something cheap inside of his perspective which others might call very cheap or just very expensive. Nothing wrong about this. I just wanted to remind that every standard is a relative one and some of the posts are in the old "absolut truth" style.


These days I am in the luxery of being able to spend enough money on my hobbies to get state of the art mid tier equipment (well, maybe more like what I recall mid tier) without stretching my legs too much and I enjoy it very much. I love to be able to get a K1-II and DFA 50 because I want it, not because I need it and the fun is revarding enough. I personally do not take the money to buy a complete Sony mirrorless equipment on the side to my Pentax lineup although the A9-II was very impressive in many ways when I tried it and it would be fun for sure. For me this is the line I personally draw where it is too much. But again, this is very personal and compared of buying a new Hasselblad lineup to the side it can very well be considered being a bargain.

This was different when I bought my violin on the merge to "become a professional", which I never ended up being despite earning enough money to get through university by playing at weddings and such. I had to get a couple of loans which I took quite some time to pay back, but my first time I played for a professor who was preparing me for my audition he right off told me to either get a better violin or forget about it.

He told me, it were not even more expensive than a new car which is a very funny thing to tell a young student. It was not that I was getting a new car either. He went on about something that I could go budget on an old French violin instead of an old Italien violin and all that suches, which means in today standards a high 5 to low 6 figure score instead of a mid 6 figure score. I ended up buying a violin which was well above of what I was able to pay for and to be honest, if I would have become a professional violinist in an orchestra I would have taken many many years to pay back for all the loans that were given so kindly to me. The violin, which I still play today, is a wonderful piece of art but much of an overkill, even for a professional musician if he is not playing a lot of solo pieces with orchestra, which only very very few do regulary.

This is just another example of how disconnected different people can be when it comes to money and for some this may sound like a rather extrem example but I assure you, insinde the "violin world" it is a pretty normal one. Same may apply for others not in this community looking at this discussion.


One point in this thread came up where I highly agree on. It is great that in photography the running costs dropped significantly with the fact we do not need to buy and develop films anymore. This allows for basically endless possibilities of testing and collecting experience. When I first bought into photography I was much less adventures because a wasted film was always wasted money. Today, if I have a two hundred picture folder of bad experiments, who cares. Just delete it and live happily after. Development utils in terms of software can be found free too, still you need a pc of course which can be a major deal. It is also great that on mostly every type of lense, wide angle, normal, tele, zoom, primes, etc there are multiple joices with very different pricing. Allowing somebody to get a $30 50mm mf prime instead of needing a $1000 DFA and still giving the opportunity to use a "nifty fifty".


Maybe we should start a "sub $200" thread with good pictures shot with equipment (to make it more simple maybe either camera or lens) costing less than $200, just to show that those pictures can be as good as others.

[normhead]

They could also save money going with the slightly more expensive combo, I know from experience that going cheaper many not be the cheapest at end of the day if you are not happy with the less expensive option if at a later date you are unhappy and will upgrade. For me this was the FAJ 70-300 if I had saved the money from that and put that towards the lens I final went with I would have been better off and saved in the long run

After I bought my DA* 60-250 we also bought a Sigma 18-250. $1200 and $400. The DA* 60-250 has survived despite a couple drops. The Sigma 18-250 became decentered and useless for our purposes, without a drop of any other kind of abuse. The 60-250 has probably cost us $200 a year, and is still functional. The Sigma cost us $200 a year-end is no longer functional and has been passed on to someone who wanted images of their dogs and didn't care if the right edge was always out of focus.

Sometimes the savings can be imaginary. A cheaper sticker price doesn't always mean cheaper to use. IN this case, I still have a working lens, the DA*60-250 was the better deal. It just took a while for it to become apparent.

[Rondec]

They could also save money going with the slightly more expensive combo, I know from experience that going cheaper many not be the cheapest at end of the day if you are not happy with the less expensive option if at a later date you are unhappy and will upgrade. For me this was the FAJ 70-300 if I had saved the money from that and put that towards the lens I final went with I would have been better off and saved in the long run

For sure.

When I was shooting mostly APS-C I was looking for a 30-ish mm lens. I started with the DA 35 limited, but it really wasn't fast enough aperture-wise (I wanted to mimic a fast 50) and the close focus feature was actually aggravating as it made the lens focus really slowly when it missed focus. So, I moved on to a Sigma 30mm f1.4. That was fast with regard to aperture, but it was not very good performance wise. So I ended up selling it and going with a used FA 31 limited, which was not cheap at all, but actually satisfied what I wanted in the first place. I think I would have been OK with the Sigma 35mm f1.4 as well. By buying lenses that really didn't satisfy what I wanted and then selling each of them for less than I paid I did lose money, but I guess it made me appreciate the goodness of the FA 31 better when I finally purchased it.

Obviously you have to go with the budget you have and the FA 31 limited isn't cheap -- not even on the used market. At the same time, it is better to buy what you want the first time than to constantly be flipping gear that you aren't happy with.