The whole point of this post. Thank you.

No, Thank you.

[brothereye]

I researched and found the K10D to be the best value for money I don't go for cheapness or exspensivness just what works best for me

True, true. Exactly how I ended up with Pentax kit. It was a difficult cliff to jump off of at the time, retailers in this area don't carry Pentax gear, it's pretty much a ca/ni-kon world, so I originally bought a used eos digital reb and kit lens. It was the least expensive way at the time to test the digital waters. It was actually a pretty nice camera, though the kit lens was not as good as the Pentax kit lens, in all the ways that matter at least. My problem was that as I wanted to expand the system, it was going to be really, really spendy. So I started checking into other options besides Brand C, and from what I could tell, Pentax offered what I wanted at a price I could afford, and I have to say, I've been quite satisfied with the decision. I don't suffer from any brand envy, although if you gave me a C or N for free I would certainly accept it graciously. I might use it, but to be honest I would likely sell it and buy a couple of lenses I've had my eye on.

[fannibal]

haha I drive a hyundai and I am planning on buying a pentax =)

(although hyundai owns kia now, I think hyundai's quality is still better than Kia)

[Big Dave]

who dosent like the beatles?

The answer is Heather Mills. LOL

Dave

[Big Dave]

haha I drive a hyundai and I am planning on buying a pentax =)

(although hyundai owns kia now, I think hyundai's quality is still better than Kia)

Ford owns half of Hyundai.

Dave

[Entropy]

I use Linux. It's just a better OS, and it's free.

After ruling out Canon because all of the bodies in my price range were crippled ($800 body with no spot metering WHAT?), the above ruled out Nikon and sent me looking for alternatives. I refuse to give Nikon any of their money after their "We are doing this for your own good. Really we are. We swear!" response to the NEF white balance encryption fiasco.

There is no legitimate technical reason for encrypting any part of a photo. The only reason to do so is to give yourself the ability to abuse the DMCA and sue people who write RAW converters that are (god forbid) actually better than yours!

[momtographer]

well concidering that canikon is consumer driven and just about every tom dick and harry is getting into slr's without knowing a darn thing about them,their making bank, spend money on advertising, product placement ect,scimp on the camera, its also convienient to not include features so you can include it with your 1000 dollar plus cameras, my friend was going to buy the d300, shes never had anything but point and shoots,she wanted it because of the price, "that expensive it must be good..." its the mentality of a lot of people.

[Outlaw]

. . . my friend was going to buy the d300, shes never had anything but point and shoots,she wanted it because of the price, "that expensive it must be good..." its the mentality of a lot of people.

Sad isn't it? Folks like this should be more altruistic and donate some of their excess cash to feed those of us who have really bad LBA and CBA. Then they could still afford to buy Pentax and get great value for their $$'s.

[monochrome]

best point I have seen made here

First - Lowell, when I see a sensible post I glance left to see who wrote it (this requires an actual decision to move my eyes due to loss of peripheral vision) and more often than not the post is yours.

My grandmother gave me a KX as a college graduation present in 1977. She called it a thinking man's camera. I've been a Pentax owner ever since - I never even looked at the Canon or Nikon digitals - I sort of waited for Pentax to figure it out - and I have some SMCP lenses, so . . .

I was a scholarship student at a fancy private school in the 60's and 70's. I was one of the few students who did not have an SLR - this was the late 60's and early 70's, and these 15 year olds had their own $500 kits - that would be $5000 in today's mini-bucks.

Spotmatics were the NORM - they were the safe choice.

Cool people had a Nikon; strange people had a Canon; really rich people had a Hasselblad; my girlfriend had a Pentax and her father had a darkroom in the basement. My younger brother got an Olympus as a gift (dad had some good years in the 70's) - and that was bold.

Pentax has only been quirky since Nikon captured the pro market and Canon made its consumer brand move in the 80's. That left Pentax people to mutter in our beer, "It's all about the glass."

Today my classmates have inherited and our children are graduating college. Canon is the safe choice, Nikon is still the cool choice, Pentax is the strange choice and really rich people own a Leica (but the Hasselblad is in a case in the study).

Nothing has changed but the names.

[Canada_Rockies]

I bought my first Pentax, THE first Pentax ever made (series, not serial number) with a Takumar 55mm f/2.2 lens, in a pawn shop in Vancouver BC, Canada, in 1961. I met some very nice people who loved taking pictures, and they helped me learn how to use this fancy advanced camera. I added a Takumar 135/3.5 later the same year, and years later finally got around to buying a wide angle, a 28/3.5 Takumar SMC.

The old Pentax' shutters wore out and a collector who owned a camera shop swapped me a used KX with an SMC 55/1.8 and an M42 to K mount adapter for it with its 55/2.2 original lens, and proudly put it on his display rail. Imagine that: my light meter was right in the finder, and I could see the f/stop in the periscope and the shutter speed I had set and what my meter thought it should be, all without taking my eye from the viewfinder. The new camera even stopped the lens down all by itself to what I had set; I no longer had to flick the second aperture ring to close the lens down to taking aperture. he wonders of technology!

I swapped the 135 and 28 for K mount versions (both M as it happens). I started working as the accountant at a newspaper and took photos of my kids in sports, and decided I just had to have a winder. I was sticking my thumb into my eye too often. I bought a brand new SF-1 (I couldn't afford the LX with winder I really wanted), foolishly trading in the KX. Later I bought the A 70-210 rather than the F 70-210 that was right beside it because it was a stop faster at the long end, and replaced the 135. I bought a 1.4X-S to make my 70-210 longer sometimes.

I came across the M 400/5.6 for $330 in the mid 80's. I bought a used ME and a new FA 28-80 for my wife to take in her backpack for a two month cycling vacation in Europe September and October 1991. A nice light, compact and flexible combination.

When my wife's eyes started to get a bit blurry, she started using the SF-1 rather than the ME, with the 28-80. She could let the camera focus. I bought the MZ-S and FA 24-90 for my use. I tried a couple of other brands of lens along the way, and was not happy with the results, so they were retired. I bought a Pentax 28/3.5 shift lens while I was living in Chicago, and a Sigma 170-500. I did some trading when I came back, and ended up with the 100 macro and a few dollars and a couple of other goodies. The ME and 28/3.5 no longer show in my signature because my daughter in law is using them on permanent loan. A small legacy from my father allowed me to buy the k10D with grip and 12-24, the DA* 16-50 and the DA* 50-135. I have recently purchased the Pentax AF 1.7X converter in the forum market place.

That's how my kit grew, slowly and piece by piece. A little wider here, a little longer there, a little automation on the back end of the lens, and finally digital. Isn't it nice that I can still use everything I own? Isn't it nice that I don't have to run out and replace everything, just because I bought an autofocus Pentax body, as happened to those poor Canon and Minolta owners back in the 1980's?

The K10D focuses a bit slower than the D3, but still a lot faster than me. The M lenses are a bit of a hassle to expose with, but I'm learning how. One of these years, I just might trade the M's for DA versions, but maybe not the macro - I like snap-in-focus for flowers and bugs, I do. There is no rush. I use Pentax gear, I can take my time to go through the changes.

Pentax is perfect? No. But neither is anyone else. I would like a few changes to the K10. I would like it to still accept an f/stop ring and expose as well as it does on the MZ-S, but it ain't going to happen. It would be wonderful if it had a noise free ISO 6,400. It ain't going to happen. It will never be able to use my AF500FTZ flash, either, darn it.

I used to maintain my cars myself. On my new truck, I can't even find the spark plugs. Technology advances. We old Pentax users are very, very lucky. We can still use the old gear, with a bit of adjustment on our parts. Our gear is not better, nor any worse, than the others out there. We fail here, they fail there, we cost less, they cost more, ....

I warned you about the length.

[christinelandon]

OK, so here's mine: we are social animals. The individual cannot exist (can't even be born!) without the community, just as the community consists of nothing but individuals. Nice to be a part of you all! Nice to be me, too!

That, and our fondness/fury over matters Pentax, is why we're here on the Forums.

[reeftool]

I bought the K10D because it had the features I wanted (weatherproofing) and a very good price. I also based my decision on past good luck with Pentax cameras. I bought my first Pentax in the early 70's when Pentax was on the top of the heap in the camera world and the M42 mount was the "standard". So much for nonconformity. Anybody who would base a purchase decision of a camera, car, or anything for that matter just to be different and avoid the major manufacturers is going to get burned. Canon and Nikon didn't get where they are building junk and selling it with flashy ads. Some camera makers dragged their feet with digital cameras and went down the tubes. Now they are all playing catch up. Pentax is an old and respected camera maker that has always made a decent product and I hope they hang around.

[filmamigo]

joefru, I often find myself doing/feeling the same thing.

I have come to think of myself as contrarian. It's not really by choice -- I think life would be easier (if not happier) if I just went with the mainstream on everything.

Notable contrarian choices I have made:
Being an Amiga computer user.
A Mac user.
A Pentax shooter.
Preferring Panasonic electronics over Sony.
Living downtown in a large urban centre (when my friends and family all desperately wished I would stay semi-rural).
Driving a domestic car (Mustang) even though I live downtown (sometimes the norms get reversed, eh?)
Making feature films in a country that allocates less than 2% of it's screen time to domestic films.

All of these choices were not made out of a desire to be contrarian. I made them because they felt right for me, because I researched what I needed, what I wanted and what I could afford.

They don't even start out as contrarian positions, either. As a kid, we had Commodore computers, like everyone else on the block. When the other kids started to get IBM PCs (so that dad could do some "real work") the Amiga had the same processing power, was 1/3 the price, and had colour, sound and video support that rocked my world. As an artsy kid, the Amiga rocked. The PC had blinking black and white screens and Lotus 123. Suddenly I was a contrarian.

After Commodore folded, and I was orphaned computer wise, I switched completely to PCs. I learned them inside out, and even built my own video editing workstations. I was definitely in the mainstream again, and liked the fact that I could buy PC parts from any store. Unfortunately I needed those parts pretty often... over my lengthy stay with PCs I found the parts unreliable, the software corruptable and spent WEEKS at a time getting things to run smoothly. The last time both my work and home PC crapped out, I ended it. Bought a Mac, never looked back. I paid a couple hundred dollars more up-front, and never put more money into the machine after that. I just worked. Is that being contrarian? Suddenly I couldn't buy software at every corner store, but the pay off was worth it to me.

When I could afford to buy a nice camera (I won a camera store contest) I splurged and went Nikon. (Like the post indicated above, it seemed both cool and safe.) I researched enough to know the F80 was a good camera. But I didn't appreciate how high the system costs were.

While shooting the F80, I would look at glass, and never be able to afford it. I would look at older/cheaper Nikon glass, and it wouldn't meter on the camera. WTF? I noticed that there was a lot of nice Pentax glass for less money, and I learned the cameras were all FULLY compatible with it.

When I looked to go digital, I would have made do with a Nikon D40 (but it feels like a toy.) But it wouldn't autofocus with most lenses..... How about metering with older lenses? Well, here's the D200. That's a lot of money just to enable metering!!

Finally, I decided to try out the alternatives. I went Pentax after research and handling the cameras.

I guess it's contrarian, but it doesn't hold me back. All 35mm SLRs take the same film. All DSLRs make the same JPEG files. Different cars all burn the same gas and drive on the same roads. My Mac surfs the web and creates MS Word documents well. So maybe I'm not that contrarian after all. I just feel it sometimes.

[cygnet]

So all these folks that just buy on price/features/benefits reasons - how come y'all don't have Samsung cameras? You can't tell me that whatever badge is on a camera doesn't have some caché. I figure most cameras are pretty similar at similar price ranges. But I wouldn't be caught dead with a Nikon or Canon around my neck.
Most folks out there in the world at large have accumulated a batch of stereotypes about: the car/suv a certain type of person drives, the camera that a "good" photographer would use, the genre of movie specific sexes appreciate, the kinds of food certain races eat, and etc. etc., and their brains react to these assumptions without any reasoned input. I take a certain amusement in subverting their suppositions.
Oh yeah, and I'm one of those photogs that for the last 30 years has been putting black tape over the logos of all my stuff, just to confuse judgemental people a little more. And I know what you're going to say, "if there's tape over the label why wouldn't I wear a Nicanon"? Because I would know what's under the tape, and I just can't picture myself as one of "them". And yes, I'm operating under my own stereotypes, I'm just a contradictory person, and I like it that way.

[joefru]

When I bought my K10D, the Samsung GX-10 was about $50 more. I have no explanation as to why. However, had it been the other way around, I probably still would have gotten the Pentax. Although a surprising number of people have never heard of Pentax, at least the ones who have know they make cameras.