I have been thinking of changing to Pentax for a while now. I had a false start when a missed the big price hike by 1 day which put me off for a while. I have a number of Pentax lenses which I have used for a while on a Nex but with the discontinuation of the K 01, I have taken the plunge and got a body only kit. I am looking forward to being part of the Forum
I have had it for a couple of weeks now and have put several hundred actuation's through it and discovered that I like it a lot . Being an Architect and Designer I was also interested to see what Marc Newson had achieved with the design. It seems to be a 'me too' adaptation with designer knobs but much better done than the Canon effort and very different from the Nex (which I also own). I suspect he actually did much much more & better but was beaten down by Pentax internal corporate priorities to a much watered down result. On my list of essentials if I had the commission to design this sort of camera from the K30 box of bits would be most of what has been done but would include 3 additional 'A' list items in no particular order.
1 A tilting screen for obvious reasons, probably a detachable one.
2 Ditch 12 bit & up it to 16bit raw
3 Ditch the anti-aliasing filter - the included one is excessively fierce
Nos 1 & 3 are a non cost addition. No 2 would need effort but would be a natural future addition to the K5 11s. The result of this would be an art camera - a whole new market segment and could probably still do 1 frame per sec on continuous low.
After a couple of days using the camera I made a screen viewer from a slide viewer so that I can use the camera in a more conventional SLR way when I want to. It fits into the hot shoe socket. It looks silly but works really well even in this preliminary form. It cost £1.50 sterling - bought from a table top sale (available new for about £6) and transforms the camera in use in the field especially in strong sunlight. The slight angle is because I have not butchered the viewer which has a lip. I used a scrunchy to lock it in place rather than magnets (as used on the Nex version I have had for 2 years now) because they would upset the chip stabilisation mechanism and probably ruin it. These viewers work with short & long sight up to +/- 2 diopters so most people would not need to wear glasses to use the camera - useful with old eyes.
I am really looking forward to using the camera over the summer months with the superb M & K lenses and getting a working relationship with that anti-aliasing filter.
Photo 1 The first mock up
Photo 2 Fitted to the camera
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