[jgredline]

We all know that C*non and N*kon seem to take the cake on other forums. Regarding the K10d, I have come across feeling that I made the wrong choice. Here is why: Edge softness, noise at higher ISO, slow focus, etc. - how much of this do you believe to be factual? The softness and sharpness issues concern me, noise at higher ISO I care less about right now, and slow focus - pixel sharpness, etc also concern me.

When I first bought my K10D i had similar problems...Turns out it was because I was using cheap lenses...Now that I have a slew of very good lenses, problems solved...

[carpents]

ah, but you want it in-stock, and not have to wait for special orders, or worse beg retailers or reps to make sure your get your hands on it... ok then, that's another story.

Completeness of lineup and availability of lenses is not a Pentax strength, period.

You and I are happy because we've been able to built respective kits, but you'll agree that the 14 months it took me to secure an FA* 85/1.4 is not a positive.

[Redwood10D]

Are the underexposure issues really as pronounced as RiceHigh makes them seem on his blog? I just read a post on his blog that is making me seriously reconsider purchasing a K10d, but again, this is something I haven't read about ANYWHERE else...

Is it simply his settings, or the way he's shooting the camera, that is causing such dramatic underexposure???

There's all kinds of posters, Hannican. Just like real life you and you alone are the final factor in all your decisions. All I can do is share my own path that took me to the K10D. I have used a SLR for many years (Canon AE1 and AE1-program, Kodak Medalist) have several lenses for them and have shot my way through a small mountian of various film types and speeds. When digital came on, I could not afford the $10-15,000 price range of a pro camera, so decided to go p&s and did so with various Nikons and Canons. They are nice cameras but not quite satisfying.

I bought the K10D because of what it offered, not because of what it didn't offer. I love the feel, the ergonomics. The button/wheel/lever controls beat anything in the pro-sumer price range. I have rapid control of my camers and it has a wide range of attributes.

Yes, when measured by a stop watch the Nikon or Cannon competitor may (MAY) be a few 10ths faster here or there, but for me these measurement differences were not important and I considered them mute points. Given the sum total of what I wanted the K10D was a perfect choice, all things considered.

[WMBP]

That being said, here is my summary of the state of Pentax DSLRs:......

Ray,

EXCELLENT post, and obviously based not only on real experience but on a balanced sense of real-world priorities -- in other words, it sounds as if you've got some common sense as well as technical know-how. Thanks for taking the time to sum that stuff up.

P-TTL is not as consistent as TTL was with my film bodies, and it causes many folks to blink right at the moment of exposure. I can work around this by using the red-eye pre-pre flash, but that has issues as well. I get better results with auto flashes, although I do miss the high speed sync of P-TTL. P-TTL flash is all but useless as far as I am concerned.

I have been sensing that this might be the case. I too have more folks blinking in photos than I think should be the case and I've wondered if it's not the P-TTL option. But what's a mother to do? I've got a K10D and a couple of 540 FGZ units. Old-world TTL isn't an option to me, is it? The convenience of P-TTL is worth a lot when I am shooting in a hurry, which is most of the time. Unless I missed it, I don't think that you mentioned what flash units/models you use yourself.

The image quality/noise of the 6.1mp Pentax bodies is excellent. The noise of the K10D is not out of line with the competition, but it is not the camera I pick up for low light shooting either. I really do not shoot the K10D above 400 ISO.

OK, I'll bite. What do you use when you have to shoot above 400 ISO? You got a prototype of a full-frame Pentax K1D? (Sigh.)

I feel privileged when I get to break the ISO barrier, which for me means shooting below 500 ISO.

Will

[m8o]

Completeness of lineup and availability of lenses is not a Pentax strength, period.
You and I are happy because we've been able to built respective kits, but you'll agree that the 14 months it took me to secure an FA* 85/1.4 is not a positive.

that I will. I get your point now, sadly; thanx for your patience.

[benjikan]

We all know that C*non and N*kon seem to take the cake on other forums. Regarding the K10d, I have come across feeling that I made the wrong choice. Here is why: Edge softness, noise at higher ISO, slow focus, etc. - how much of this do you believe to be factual? The softness and sharpness issues concern me, noise at higher ISO I care less about right now, and slow focus - pixel sharpness, etc also concern me.

I made the right choice...

Ben

[jgredline]

I made the right choice...

Ben

What a great pic !!!!

[GaryML]

Yes, when measured by a stop watch the Nikon or Cannon competitor may (MAY) be a few 10ths faster here or there, but for me these measurement differences were not important and I considered them mute points.

I will add my $0.02 worth:

I owned a K10D for about 7 months, and a *ist DL for a year before that. The K10D produced some wonderful images, but it had some shortcomings that caused me to look elsewhere:

Positives:

1. No problem with soft images at all. I fiddled with the camera .jpeg settings a bit and the out-of-camera image quality was excellent for casual use (family photos and the like). I use RAW for critical work, and got excellent results with both the Pentax Photo Lab and Adobe Lightroom RAW processing programs.

2. No problem with metering at all. Almost always use matrix metering and check the back LCD for blown highlights or lost detail in dark areas.

Negatives:

1. Poor AF performance for sports/action and low-light. It was not a few tenths of a second difference - it was several seconds of hunting and still failing to get focus in moderately poor indoor lighting. Many blurred shots of the kids's indoor events (awards ceremonies, band concerts, etc.). Yes I can manually focus, but I didn't spend thousands of dollars for a fancy new digital SLR system for this. Sports/action use was even worse: predictive focus performance is terrible with uo to 50% of fast action shots out of focus. In this area, the DA* 50-135mm f/2.8 greatly improved the performance over the screw-drive Pentax and Sigma lenses, but it still was not as good as the competition. And, of course, there is no SDM lens longer than 135mm and no word when such a product may be released. I have used many lenses with the K10D in this situation, including the FA 77 f1.8 Ltd, FA 135mm f2.8, Sigma APO 100-300mm f4 DX EG, Pentax F 70-210mm f4-5.6, and the DA* 50-135mm f2.8.

2. Poor noise performance at ISO 1600. Some low-light shots at ISO 1600 were usable, but many were not with lots of noise, visible patterns in some areas (both light and dark), and just poor picture quality.

3. Irregular flash performance. Sometimes the flash system worked great (using a Pentax AF-360 FGZ both in the hot shoe and wireless), and sometimes the exposures were way off. Usually, bouncing off the ceiling worked great, but in a room with a dark ceiling the direct flash performance was sometimes worse than most cheap point and shoots.

4. Poor selection of lenses and inconsistent lens performance. In addition to the afore-mentioned total lack of any long, fast Pentax lenses, the performance of some of the lenses was disappointing. I used both the DA 14mm f2.8 and later a DA 12-24mm f4. The DA 14 needed to be stopped well down for any kind of sharpness and showed a fair amount of CA. The DA 12-24 showed good sharpness even at wider apertures and has fairly low barrel distortion, but the CA is severe! Even the FA 77 Limited needed to be stopped down pretty far to eliminate green color fringing.

I ended up replacing the Pentax K10D system with a Nikon D80 and four Nikkor lenses. The Nikon system is better in some ways than the K10D system and worse in others. The AF performance is a dramatic improvement. In situations in which the K10D will not focus, the Nikon will hit the correct focus most of the time. This is not "measurbating tenths of a second;" this is the real difference between a focused shot that is usable versus a blurred, unusable shot. At a school award ceremony a few weeks ago, I got 4 out of 5 perfect shots of my son getting his award, using the D80 with a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VR lens. Last spring, in the very same room in the very same light and distance, I got 0 out of 5 shots that were usable with the Pentax K10D and the FA 135mm f2.8. That is a very real benefit for me; not just "measurbating."

Using the Nikon D80 with the Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VR for sports/action shots (daytime soccer games), I now get 95%+ shots in perfect focus, compared to maybe 50% with the K10D + Sigma 100-300 f4 (using AF-C mode -- I get more in focus with AF-S but the shutter won't release sometimes at the decisive moment). With the K10D and the DA* 50-135mm f2.8, I could get maybe up to 90% in focus, but that lens is just too short for this application. And it still misses focus when the subject is running directly towards the camera. Where are the long SDM lenses? How many years are we going to wait for Pentax to catch up to the competition?

Flash performance with the Nikon has been very consistent. Using an SB-800 Speedlight, every flash exposure has been perfect. However, I've only used the flash on maybe two occasions.

High ISO on the D80 is better than the K10D, and about equal to the *ist DL. Noise is well-controlled, but the images are definitely softer above ISO 800. I'm sure that there are other cameras with better high ISO performance, but the D80 (and the *ist DL) are good enough for me. Out of the box, without a lot of PP, the D80 beats the K10D.

The D80 is slightly more expensive than the K10D. And the Nikon lenses I bought are significantly more expensive than the Pentax lenses that they replaced (but I choose the more expensive "professional" Nikon lenses so this represents an upgrade). The Nikkor 12-24mm f4 DX out-performs the Pentax DA 12-24mm f4 by a wide margin with significantly less CA. And I can get a 200mm f2.8 autofocus AF-S lens for the Nikon, which is simply not available for the Pentax system at any price.

On the flip side, for travel and landscape photography the Pentax system worked great. Except for some extra effort to address the CA in PP, it was a great performing system. The smaller, lighter lenses are more pleasant to carry all day as compared to the heavier Nikon equipment. For outdoor use with static subjects, I was pretty well satisfied with the Pentax gear. And I still have my Pentax film gear for such applications and it works great.

So, to respond to the initial question, I have experienced some of the problems that the O.P. expressed concern about, and ultimately it was enough to compel me to look elsewhere. But it depends on the type of photographs you are interested in creating, and whether these specific shortcomings are a serious obstacle for that type of photography.

[regken]

Gary,
Thanks for that comparison. It bears out what I suspected in regards to the differences. I'm glad the D80 is getting the job done for you.

Regards,

Ken

[lol101]

Nice and detailled report here Gary,

Truly, sports OR low light are the Achile's heel of the K10 (shall we say of the Pentax system?) so when you do sports AND low light... definitely not recomended!

You made the right choice here, it's obvious and this will remain true as long as Pentax doesn't get on with a serious upgrade in their AF tracking system and algorithms as well as some SDM long tele lenses.

Maybe next year, who knows but if I were in your shoes, I would have done the same without hesitating: you'll never get back the pictures you miss now, no time for waiting.

Note for Pentax's engineers: My oldest son is 4 years old now, so that should give you about two years to comply... come on, get busy!

[carpents]

I made the right choice...

Ben

Ben,

You're simultaneously making and breaking the argument. Your picture, while excellent, could have been taken with absolutely any camera system out there. There is nothing even very specific to the lens used, as you can get sharp lenses for every system.

But having a camera with a PC Synch connection might have made it easier to hook in to your studio lights.

So it is capable, yes; however, Pentax has some shortcomings. Hopefully some of them will be addressed soon. (And I don't agree with almost every complaint up to this point, including AF speed and especially JPEG sharpness.)

--Sean

[stewart_photo]

(snip) 1. Poor AF performance for sports/action and low-light. It was not a few tenths of a second difference - it was several seconds of hunting and still failing to get focus in moderately poor indoor lighting. (snip)

I'm not disputing your findings, but I just don't understand why my experiences would be so dramatically different. Using a fairly slow zoom lens, the Tamron AF 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3, I can still focus quickly on everything in a darkened room (50-ft room with three lights on one side, focusing on objects located in the darkened side).

The very slowest focusing situation involved an entirely black chair on the other side of the room at the longest zoom setting, but even then the camera focused in under two seconds (not the several seconds you describe). The camera focused on every other object in the room in well under a second, with the only exceptions being the wall and other areas of the room without any pattern or contrast at all.

My wife's lens, the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3, focused slightly slower, but not anywhere near as slowly as you describe. In fact, nothing I tried with either lens, except total darkness (no room lights), resulted in focusing speeds that slow.

2. Poor noise performance at ISO 1600. Some low-light shots at ISO 1600 were usable, but many were not with lots of noise, visible patterns in some areas (both light and dark), and just poor picture quality. (snip)

I simple cannot agree with this. Now that winter is quickly setting in, about eighty percent of my current outdoor images are shot at ISO 800-1600 and all of them are very usable with only minimal post processing (Neat Image).

stewart

[jgredline]

I will add my $0.02 worth:

I owned a K10D for about 7 months, and a *ist DL for a year before that. The K10D produced some wonderful images, but it had some shortcomings that caused me to look elsewhere:

Positives:

1. No problem with soft images at all. I fiddled with the camera .jpeg settings a bit and the out-of-camera image quality was excellent for casual use (family photos and the like). I use RAW for critical work, and got excellent results with both the Pentax Photo Lab and Adobe Lightroom RAW processing programs.

2. No problem with metering at all. Almost always use matrix metering and check the back LCD for blown highlights or lost detail in dark areas.

Negatives:

1. Poor AF performance for sports/action and low-light. It was not a few tenths of a second difference - it was several seconds of hunting and still failing to get focus in moderately poor indoor lighting. Many blurred shots of the kids's indoor events (awards ceremonies, band concerts, etc.). Yes I can manually focus, but I didn't spend thousands of dollars for a fancy new digital SLR system for this. Sports/action use was even worse: predictive focus performance is terrible with uo to 50% of fast action shots out of focus. In this area, the DA* 50-135mm f/2.8 greatly improved the performance over the screw-drive Pentax and Sigma lenses, but it still was not as good as the competition. And, of course, there is no SDM lens longer than 135mm and no word when such a product may be released. I have used many lenses with the K10D in this situation, including the FA 77 f1.8 Ltd, FA 135mm f2.8, Sigma APO 100-300mm f4 DX EG, Pentax F 70-210mm f4-5.6, and the DA* 50-135mm f2.8.

2. Poor noise performance at ISO 1600. Some low-light shots at ISO 1600 were usable, but many were not with lots of noise, visible patterns in some areas (both light and dark), and just poor picture quality.

3. Irregular flash performance. Sometimes the flash system worked great (using a Pentax AF-360 FGZ both in the hot shoe and wireless), and sometimes the exposures were way off. Usually, bouncing off the ceiling worked great, but in a room with a dark ceiling the direct flash performance was sometimes worse than most cheap point and shoots.

4. Poor selection of lenses and inconsistent lens performance. In addition to the afore-mentioned total lack of any long, fast Pentax lenses, the performance of some of the lenses was disappointing. I used both the DA 14mm f2.8 and later a DA 12-24mm f4. The DA 14 needed to be stopped well down for any kind of sharpness and showed a fair amount of CA. The DA 12-24 showed good sharpness even at wider apertures and has fairly low barrel distortion, but the CA is severe! Even the FA 77 Limited needed to be stopped down pretty far to eliminate green color fringing.

I ended up replacing the Pentax K10D system with a Nikon D80 and four Nikkor lenses. The Nikon system is better in some ways than the K10D system and worse in others. The AF performance is a dramatic improvement. In situations in which the K10D will not focus, the Nikon will hit the correct focus most of the time. This is not "measurbating tenths of a second;" this is the real difference between a focused shot that is usable versus a blurred, unusable shot. At a school award ceremony a few weeks ago, I got 4 out of 5 perfect shots of my son getting his award, using the D80 with a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VR lens. Last spring, in the very same room in the very same light and distance, I got 0 out of 5 shots that were usable with the Pentax K10D and the FA 135mm f2.8. That is a very real benefit for me; not just "measurbating."

Using the Nikon D80 with the Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VR for sports/action shots (daytime soccer games), I now get 95%+ shots in perfect focus, compared to maybe 50% with the K10D + Sigma 100-300 f4 (using AF-C mode -- I get more in focus with AF-S but the shutter won't release sometimes at the decisive moment). With the K10D and the DA* 50-135mm f2.8, I could get maybe up to 90% in focus, but that lens is just too short for this application. And it still misses focus when the subject is running directly towards the camera. Where are the long SDM lenses? How many years are we going to wait for Pentax to catch up to the competition?

Flash performance with the Nikon has been very consistent. Using an SB-800 Speedlight, every flash exposure has been perfect. However, I've only used the flash on maybe two occasions.

High ISO on the D80 is better than the K10D, and about equal to the *ist DL. Noise is well-controlled, but the images are definitely softer above ISO 800. I'm sure that there are other cameras with better high ISO performance, but the D80 (and the *ist DL) are good enough for me. Out of the box, without a lot of PP, the D80 beats the K10D.

The D80 is slightly more expensive than the K10D. And the Nikon lenses I bought are significantly more expensive than the Pentax lenses that they replaced (but I choose the more expensive "professional" Nikon lenses so this represents an upgrade). The Nikkor 12-24mm f4 DX out-performs the Pentax DA 12-24mm f4 by a wide margin with significantly less CA. And I can get a 200mm f2.8 autofocus AF-S lens for the Nikon, which is simply not available for the Pentax system at any price.

On the flip side, for travel and landscape photography the Pentax system worked great. Except for some extra effort to address the CA in PP, it was a great performing system. The smaller, lighter lenses are more pleasant to carry all day as compared to the heavier Nikon equipment. For outdoor use with static subjects, I was pretty well satisfied with the Pentax gear. And I still have my Pentax film gear for such applications and it works great.

So, to respond to the initial question, I have experienced some of the problems that the O.P. expressed concern about, and ultimately it was enough to compel me to look elsewhere. But it depends on the type of photographs you are interested in creating, and whether these specific shortcomings are a serious obstacle for that type of photography.

Gary
It sounds like you have went way out of your way to ''trash'' pentax...I can tell you this..I own a Nikon D40 and a D200 and I can tell you that my Nikons do not have anything on my Pentaxs cameras in ISO or Auto focus performance...
Perhaps it was the operator and not the Camera that was the real problem..

[Tom Lusk]

"Gary
It sounds like you have went way out of your way to ''trash'' pentax"

???

Yikes! Are you campaigning for President...

of the Pentax Fanboys?

Gary compared AF capabilities of a K10 and a D80; he came to the conclusion (accepted by nearly everyone) that the D80's is superior, and you comment:

"Perhaps it was the operator and not the Camera that was the real problem.."

I thought Gary's post was well balanced. Poor, poor, pitiful me.

[GaryML]

It sounds like you have went way out of your way to ''trash'' pentax...I can tell you this..I own a Nikon D40 and a D200 and I can tell you that my Nikons do not have anything on my Pentaxs cameras in ISO or Auto focus performance...
Perhaps it was the operator and not the Camera that was the real problem..

It gave me me no pleasure at all to sell over $4000 of Pentax gear at a loss of about 25% and invest in a new system. My intent is not to trash Pentax: my intent is to share my experience with certain specific issues raised by the O.P. and discussed by other members.

Yes, maybe it is operator error. But with the same operator, I get 40 out of 80 shots in-focus at a soccer game with the Pentax K10D and Sigma APO 100-300mm f4 EX DG, and I get 78 out of 80 shots in focus with a Nikon D80 and a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VR. Even if it is operator error, this incompetant operator gets more keepers with the Nikon gear. Maybe my specific Sigma lens was a lemon or maybe I have no idea of what I'm doing in spite of 18 years of experience with SLR cameras, but that is what happened.

The low-light focus problem was in two different school auditoriums with nasty fluorescent lighting and a subject slowing moving maybe 40-60 feet away from me. I had all kinds of problems getting the white balance correct with the K10D (but that's easy to fix in PP), but the camera simply never got a good lock on my subject. I tried a mix of AF-S, AF-C and manual focus and just never got it sharp. Slow shutter speeds (1/15 to 1/30), wide open at f2.8 and high ISO (800). The Nikon just gave me sharp pictures with the 70-200mm f2.8 VR lens and the Pentax with the FA 135mm f2.8 and in-body SR gave me 100% duds. So here's dad with all of his fancy camera gear and I couldn't produce one decent picture from the school awards ceremony with the Pentax gear, yet the Nikon gear gave me 80% keepers. Yes, maybe that was operator error also, but if Nikon covers up my poor technique and gives me a couple a decent shots to show my family, then its worth every penny to save that embarrassment. My daughter plays in a concert band and I did get some good shots at other venues with better light, but in the most difficult conditions the Nikon and the big Nikkor zoom came through where the Pentax let me down.

So feel free to judge my intentions as you see fit. I have no agenda other than taking some pictures and having some fun with my hobby. I'm just one amateur sharing my personal experience. Your milage may vary.

I think that Stewart gets different AF results due to the different conditions with different light and much shorter focus distances. I didn't have problems with the Pentax in home interiors. And I admit that the only noise reduction software I tried is what is available in Adobe Lightroom, which is perhaps not very good for this purpose. That's why I compared the results as "out of the box."

And thanks to lol101 and regken for their kind comments.