[Trickortreat]

Yeh, forgot to mention Nikon DX 35mm f1.8, silly me
Pentax fa 35mm f2 has some CA and purple fringing issues and is a rather dated design so i didnt mention it. Da 35 seems a more modern and updated variation with better results, but it is slow :/
Sigma 30mm f1.4 and Pentax fa 31 f1.8 are too heavy and rather expensive.
I was mentioning lighter and cheaper lenses. Thats why i didnt mention the upcomming Fuji 33mm f1 lens. Seems its gonna be heavy.
Well. I dont use zooms. Just dont like the rendition they give me. Even tho zooms in the focal length i use are extremely light (23ish to 50mm on a crop body). And zooms are slow. I was concerned about faster glass lacking in Pentax lineup.

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Last edited by Trickortreat; 09-21-2018 at 02:28 PM.

[troika]

I'm happy to see this thread. It amazes me how much we collectively bash the brand that we love enough to join a forum dedicated it.

I'm not a professional photographer. It's a very zen and artistic endeavor to me. I like the ergonomics of Pentax over other brands. I recently looked over the wall and I just don't connect with the modern-electronic like design of most cameras. I started on my dad's Canon AE1 and it was exposure triangle, focus and composition. It wasn't hard and I enjoyed it.

As cameras got more modern, I shot in auto mode and forgot how to take a picture. I tried to re-teach myself, but sorting through menus is hiding, to me, the simple nature of photography. With a few cool, modern exceptions, Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic feel more like smart phones than SLRs to me. Pentax has retained that camera first experience at a fraction of the cost of Leica.

Pentax, more than any other brand, has build a system around retro compatibility. Decades of excellent K-Mount glass ready to mount and shoot. Shake Reduction on the sensor, so it is all image stabilized. Catch in Focus...this is so brilliant and so obvious, but Pentax is the only brand that does it, partially because Canon changed their lens mount and forced everyone into modern lenses, so why would they innovate a way to essentially achieve AF behavior with a great MF lens from the 70s?

Tav - I've been shooting film and it occurs to me that biggest limitation is that the film speed is the film speed and if you need for it to be different, you've got to change rolls. There is no creative value to sensitivity, it just serves to allow proper exposure based on the other two variables. So, let me control Shutter Speed and Aperture and within limits I set, let the camera adjust the ISO to get the exposure. I would even argue that Tv and Av really don't make that much sense on a dSLR, because both make adjustments with a fixed ISO and change the other aspect of the triangle in a way that will effect the image. I'm shooting Av with a 90mm lens, I don't want my shutter speed to drop below 1/90 (even though SR allows me to cheat a bit). I'd rather set my shutter to 1/90, adjust my aperture and let the ISO move within the range I specified. If I can't get the right exposure, then I can always manually lower it to 1/60 or maybe 1/30, but I don't accidentally realize that my shutter speed was unmanagably low for the lens or (in reverse) that my aperture had gotten too large or small for what I was doing when I could have just gone from ISO 200-800. Brilliant.


I have a Tokina AT-x 100-300/f4 zoom that I bought for $120 and I can shoot sports or wildlife at 7 frames per second using CIF, Tav, and get image stabilization. Unthinkable in any other system. I virtually giggle every time I use it knowing that it would cost at least a grand to do the same with a similar quality Nikor lens.


Optical View Finders - We've been arguing about this on another thread, but my preference. I liked it when the K-01 was a companion to the K5. You can save space without a view finder and sometimes that matters, so as long as the sensor is the same and it's the same lens mount, great to have the option, but for my dSLR, I still want to look through the lens at my image. No matter how cool HDR and Pixel Shift and every other modern advantage is, it still just comes down to exposure, focus, and your eye. Exposure and focus are technical, learnable, achievable, even automatable. I want my eye to be looking through the lens at my subject when I'm trying to produce something that I might be proud of later.

Weather Sealing...because among other things, I live in a very damp place and I don't want to worry about my investment or only shoot on pretty days.

I hate the idea of ever going to another brand and as long as Pentax is an option, I'll stick with it for the rest of my life.

[kypfer]

I bought into Pentax with the last of their film cameras, the original *ist, simply because the Fujicas I'd been using before then had reached their use-by date and I had a bagful of "legacy" screw-mount lenses that I wanted to continue using!


My new K-70 is my fourth Pentax digital body, most of the old screw-mount glass is still in my bag/drawer and still gets used, though I have to admit to having extended my capabilities with a few bayonet-mount lenses in more recent times

[MarkJerling]

When I first became interested in photography I walked into my local camera shop, Shaps Cameraland in Long Street, Cape Town (They're still there) and Gerald Shap tried to sell me a Minolta. That did not work as planned and I bought a Pentax instead.

And here we are 30 years later. If I could be persuaded to go to any other brand, hypothetically, then maybe Nikon. But no, I'll stick with Pentax.

[MrB1]

I began in 2011 when I went to a big store to look at different models for around £500. The Pentax K-r (with both kit lenses) was the one that felt good in the hand - the other brands seemed more like plastic toys. Since then I have collected quite a few lenses (ancient and modern), mainly pre-owned, and have moved on to a K-3 and a K-70. The build quality continues to impress and Pentax always gives great bang for buck value, with features that other DSLRs don't offer at the price point, like the Sv and Hyper Modes, WR, and IBIS. For my amateur photography I foresee no good reason to change brand.

Philip

[chrisfer]

I stay with Pentax for the Limited Lenses.

[Theov39]

I used Nikon cameras from my film days and still regularly use them but in 2005 I bought a Fuji S3 Pro and then later a S5 Pro. Both these cameras are based on Nikon bodies but with Fuji's magic sensor and processing. The color tonal quality of those cameras are the closest I could get to Fuji film like Velvia and it has a beautiful ephemeral quality about it that Nikon never seemed to have been able to reproduce with the funny exception of their base model D40 which produces beautiful color images.

The Pentax cameras I have used (K200, K7, K50, K3) are the closest I can find to that beautiful Fuji film like tonal color image quality and that is why I have stuck with Pentax.

I found later Nikon cameras that I used always had a sort of clinical image quality. Maybe if I spent a lot of time in Photoshop I could reproduce what I was looking for with the Nikon cameras I have used but that is way beyond my skill level. The Nikon D700 comes close OOC but it is a very big and heavy camera so you have to be pretty dedicated to carry that around everyday, good as it is. Mind you, I haven't used the current Nikon models to compare and from what I can see online, the D500 produces beautiful images.

Then of course is the added bonus of the fantastic built quality and the wide range of standard options in the higher level Pentax cameras and even in the consumer models. The only downside of owning Pentax is that they obviously don't have the service support that the larger companies have and repairs usually take a long time in Australia.

[Rondec]

Lenses have been a strong selling point od Pentax system. Now they seem to lag on that regard.
For example - every single manufacturer has a light and fast 50mm equivalent prime.
Sony has 35mm f1.8
Canon has 32mm f1.4
M43 has 25mm f1.4
Fuji has 35mm f1.4
.
.
.
Pentax has 35mm f2.4. It needs a bump in speed

I suppose. I'd go with the FA 31 or the Sigma 35 if you want that speed. Both are sharp lenses.

Many of the lenses you mention need to be stopped down a bit to eliminate vignetting and improve sharpness/contrast. I don't know that you actually would see much of a difference in the field in the performance between the DA 35 and most of those lenses. The Fuji is quite a bit better though.

[Trickortreat]

I suppose. I'd go with the FA 31 or the Sigma 35 if you want that speed. Both are sharp lenses.

Many of the lenses you mention need to be stopped down a bit to eliminate vignetting and improve sharpness/contrast. I don't know that you actually would see much of a difference in the field in the performance between the DA 35 and most of those lenses. The Fuji is quite a bit better though.

Sigma kinda has huge focusing issues and it is rather heavy.
Limited is also on the heavy side for my needs. Also costs a bit too much i would be willing to spend on a lens.
DA 35 would be perfect if it werent that slow. It reduces creative use of dof and astro stitching is also limited.

[gm4life]

Considering I have only built my kit up in the last two years... I would certainly go Pentax again. I really wouldn’t do any purchase differently... Except I would have passed on the awesome DA 55 * that I gifted in nearly new condition to my dad - upon arrival of the more exceptional D FA 50 *.

I always thought in the back of my head glass hovering around the 1,000 dollar mark or more has to be FF ready. It was one reason the D FA 70-200 was purchased over the DA 60-250 and that I embraced the DA 300 along with the D FA 50...

It made jumping to a K1 II with the D FA 28-105 a great opportunity. The main reason I went Pentax was because of my fathers past with them. I grew up around ME Supers, K1000’s and Program Pluses. I like to beat to my own drummer, and Pentax isn’t a mainstream brand. Plus they have weather sealing and typically provide a strong value of proposition in the products they build.

[kypfer]

Sometimes I wonder ... like when I go to plug my long-owned cable release into my new K-70 and find it won't fit ... then I find that the "correct" item is no longer listed on the manufacturer's web-site and when I finally track one down it costs about 5% of the purchase-price of the body

[DrMindbender]

Short answer: the lenses.

I had two lenses when I decided to get back into SLR photography this year; a Canon 200mm FL and a Pentax-M 28mm. Guess which one wasn't "Abandonware"?

[Martin KP]

It's interesting reading all of your comments, many of you are long term Pentax owners. Me, two years an owner of the venerable Kp. It feels like me and my Kp are on a photographic journey, the learning and the reading, the cropping and the highlights, the filtering and the considering and the deleting. It's all part of the creative process. What really matters to me is the confidence I get when I reach for the Kp, I know I will get great shots. And I have at my fingertips all those things I need, the exposure, the stops, the curtain thingy and all my favourite temperature set ups, there when I need to focus on the shoot, because, as all photographers know, timing is everything. To 'stay with Pentax?' sounds like this is a piece of hardware to endure and is begging so far from the truth. The Kp with the small APS-C sensor at a whooping 24M pixels has soul. It reaches in to the image and pulls out all those important subtleties needed to create something memorable. Whether I'm in a close up mood with the 50mm or I have an everything included vibe with the 35mm, I'm working in the way SLR photography has done since it's inception. And what I find is important is how Pentax owners see themselves. As Pentax owners, we are not technology demonstrators. We work in the shady subjective world which defines us as artists. And it is a world full of inspiration, tears, joy, shock and laughter. A world where the still image is now more important than ever before. But a camera is a tool and every picture needs the right tool. I like to think my Kp goes a long way to capturing the right image irrespective to the demanding conditions into which I find myself.

[howieb101]

the KP is delivering results that amaze me! VF, AF, build quality, everything is highly satisfying.

Yeah, the KP is really underrated by lots of Pentaxians. It's pretty much like a modernised K5 and the high iso output is quite legendary. On my K3 iso 4000 was my tops and really it was iso 3200. On the KP, the equivalent is pretty much iso 10,000. Such an improvement!

[MrB1]

Yeah, the KP is really underrated by lots of Pentaxians. It's pretty much like a modernised K5 and the high iso output is quite legendary. On my K3 iso 4000 was my tops and really it was iso 3200. On the KP, the equivalent is pretty much iso 10,000. Such an improvement!

And the K-70 is also good in that respect, as well as being even greater value for money.

Philip