Originally posted by Yohan Pamudji dave9t5 pretty thoroughly debunked your statement that since "lightweight" wasn't explicitly qualified as "for its class" that it was somehow a flawed claim, so I won't repeat what he said. There are lighter cameras, and if that is your primary need then definitely look at those other options.
No he didn't.
He quoted an entirely different piece of promotional material, and just repeated the assertion that I should have followed those who inferred into the ad I read some things that it didn't say.
But clearly some people are mortally offended that I criticised Pentax marketing, even though I been a Pentax SLR user for over 20 years, so we'll have to agree to disagree.
Originally posted by Yohan Pamudji If the K20D is "very heavy" for you, then you're in the wrong product segment. You should be looking at primarily plastic cameras--K2000, Digital Rebel, etc.
I had one overriding reason for not going for those cameras: the Pentax K-m and other models at that end of the market lack the dust-sealing which is needed to cope with the fact that dSLRs are much more vulnerable to dust than film SLRs. With careful design, good sealing should add much to the weight, although it does push up the price.
The other major reason was that I don't want an expensive piece of kit like an SLR body to be wrapped in a flimsy plastic shell. Film SLRs managed to be lightweight despite having a metal case, and the plastic shells are an exercise in cost-savings in tooling and in manufacture rather than lightness. Metal has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than plastic.
I also don't want all the kindergarten scene-setting modes which clutter up the K-m.
Originally posted by Yohan Pamudji For the rest of us, the K-7 is plenty small and light for its feature set. Any smaller and it wouldn't be comfortable. Any lighter and it wouldn't be as durable. I think it hits a very nice sweet spot of weight vs. durability, maximizing weight savings as much as possible without sacrificing durability.
I'm not really concerned about size, and I having tried the smaller dSLRs, most of them are just
too small. My concern is weight.
But the point which you seem to be missing is that lighter doesn't mean less durable: that depends on the strength-to-weight ratio of the materials used. Since the plastics in use are not composites, a plastic-bodied camera has to be a lot heavier to match the strength of a metal one, and a light plastic camera is fragile thing.
Originally posted by Yohan Pamudji Obviously go with what works for you.
Indeed, and you likewise.
Originally posted by Yohan Pamudji But the K-7 is relatively lightweight and that's not hype.
Relatively lightweight compared to some bricks which cost twice as much, but still heavy compared with the lightweight cameras which Pentax used to produce.
Those who want all the bells-and-whistles of the K-7 can indeed now get them in a lighter package than the Canikon offerings, and I'm delighted for those who find that works for them. If the K7 as good as the more sober previews suggest, I'm sure that Pentax will justifiably sell lots of them.
But those of who are happy to leave video to video cameras and aren't fussed over the larger screen (which has displaced some handily-located buttons) still have to choose between a brick and a fragile plastic toy.
There's a gap in the market here, which won't be met by Canikon, who seem to delight in keeping their affordable cameras fragile as a marketing distinction from their very expensive models. It's for a robust, lightweight, camera which dumps the things like video that dSLRs do badly, doesn't try to maximise the screen size, and doesn't try to build into the camera tasks which are usually performed off-camera.
In film SLR days, Pentax offered a choice of relatively simple cameras: the K-series and the M-series. K was cheap and heavy, M was pricier and lighter, but their feature sets overlapped a lot. It would be great to see that sort of choice returning.