[jsherman999]

Anyway, I see FOUR problems with K-x for me.
...
2. Worse colours and contrast than K10D, K200D, K-m and K-7. Even in RAW.
(The pictures looks like Nikon D90/Sony A700)
.
....

.


Ogl, I've lost track, do you have a K-x in your possession that you're testing right now? If so, could you post a shot of the same subject taken with both your K200D and the K-x, raw-converted (say, ACR or Silkypix) with no adjustments in conversion?

This 'worse colors and contrast' thing sounds a bit suspect to me - all modern DSLRs produce pretty great colors and contrast as long as the jpeg conversion doesn't screw it up.



.

[ogl]

.


Ogl, I've lost track, do you have a K-x in your possession that you're testing right now? If so, could you post a shot of the same subject taken with both your K200D and the K-x, raw-converted (say, ACR or Silkypix) with no adjustments in conversion?



.

I will plan. K-x is not even in price-list of Pentax dealer in Russia.
Estimated price is about $1000.

But...I need small camera for FA*24 and for FA135.

[Marc Sabatella]

IQ is not only low noise. You pay for low noise some price - worse colours and contrast. If you RAW shooter, it means - you should add every time in convertor - saturation, contrast, hue.

Iif you generally prefer your pictures with greater saturation and contrast than the defaults, then why not change the defaults? The camera lets you do that, and most RAW processing programs will honor those settings and/or let you create your own custom defaults for your camera, so you can get what you want automatically. Or just get a different RAW program that has different defaults. No reason you should be locked into the colors that your particular RAW program happens to produce by default when the camera is at its default settings. Change the defaults and from then on, you'll get what you want automatically.

[Marc Sabatella]

Can you select AF points during shooting at back LCD by wheel or by joystick? As you can select AF points in VF during shooting.

Yes, the AF point displays on the LCD, which from people have reported you can see pretty well even with your eye on the viewfinder; and you can change the selected AF point while shooting using the "joystick" (and the change is shown on the LCD, of course).

[rawr]

Time for an update I guess.

Anyway, I see FOUR problems with K-x for me.
1. No AF indicators.
2. Worse colours and contrast than K10D, K200D, K-m and K-7. Even in RAW.
(The pictures looks like Nikon D90/Sony A700)
3. Problems with batteries.
4. Still small buffer in RAW and slow buffer clearing.

Faster speed in jpeg, more fps are not for my style of shooting.
No SR switch, no WR and upper LCD are minuses too.


Pluses?
1. Outstanding noise/resolution at ISO1600/3200.
The per-pixel resolution looks better than K-7.
2. For somebody - VIDEO.

Not enough to buy K-x.

I don't want to sound like a K-x salesman here, because I'm not. It's just another camera, with advantages and disadvantages of its own relative to other cameras, like the K200D, K7, D90 etc etc. It's just gear.

But to comment on your specific points:

- AF indicators
I can live without because they are only a general guide to the area the camera is focussing on, not a pinpoint, and I can see in the AF frame what the AF segments are. That's enough for me. I don't play much with AF, except to turn it off for critical subjects, or use spot.

- colours and contrast
.. are tunable camera to camera, and in real life the outputs from any camera seem to vary so much according to lens used, exposure, ISO, metering etc at exposure time. Then the processing stage (JPG engine or the RAW convertor you choose) adds new variables that may in turn shape the image output. So it's hard to be scientific about this unless you have a lab.

But I think I do notice a difference in image tone between the K200D and the K-x, for sure. At similar ISO, the K-x's outputs do seem 'punchier' or have more 'pop' than the K200D, whose outputs seem more 'smoother' and 'restrained'. But if you asked me to demonstrate that precisely it would be very hard to do.

-the 'problem with batteries'
This issue seems to have acquired a life of its own after one (ephotozine?) review, so I will report my battery usage experience and issues so far.

I went a bit crazy using the K-x and have been spraying out the pictures. I am usually more deliberative in taking photos, but so far using just the Eveready Lithium AA's included with the camera, I've now run up a K-x shutter count of about 950, and shot about 20 minutes of video I guess, plus maybe fired off the flash about 5 times.

Since I've been shooting RAW+ (DNG and JPG) that means the camera has actually written about 1900 files to disk so far. I've also had some of the the [JPG engine] image processing bells and whistles turned on for most of the time too (ie the Lens Distortion Correction and Chromatic Aberration Correction) which result in extra CPU work for the camera with each image recorded. I've also had my JPG output at the max 12MP at highest 3 star quality, and the video settings were at full quality + audio too. So the camera has been doing a lot of work.

What I haven't done is use LiveView for anything except when I shot video, and I haven't shot a lot of flash.

So far the only battery problem has come when I went into LiveView last night to shoot my last video. Although in normal shooting mode the battery indicator showed green, after turning on Movie mode (and with it LiveView) the battery indicator showed orange, indicating some depletion of the battery. I started the video anyhow, and after about 1min 30s the camera automatically stopped the video, saved it (a 440MB AVI), and I saw the 'Battery Depleted' screen flash up.

I initially though - OK, time to change the batteries. What a drag to do that now, in the dark etc. But I switched the camera back to normal shooting mode and the battery indicator read green, so I continued shooting still images, and took another 150 RAW+ shots on the night.

And this morning the camera battery indicator is still green, so I still seem to have miles to go before the camera battery is depleted enough to stop me taking normal photos.

So I think the message is: video and LiveView are battery intensive. Use those features sparingly. But normal shooting certainly is not battery intensive, and may even be an improvement over the K200D.

Still small buffer in RAW and slow buffer clearing
Maybe true, I didn't measure it, but it did seem faster than the K200D.

No SR switch
Agreed here. I liked the switch. I don't need SR all the time and this makes it easier to turn off.

no WR and upper LCD
I haven't missed either so far. The upper LCD isn't always of much use to me anyhow in the dark, since it isn't illuminated in the K200D. But both WR and the upper LCD are certainly nice to have.

Outstanding noise/resolution at ISO1600/3200.
This is certainly turning out to be true, and this meets my needs very well, which is why I bought a K-x.

Video...
It can be handy, but it does carry a price in battery usage, alas. No free lunch with video.

--------

Time for some more K-x snapshots perhaps:

Laughing clowns, ISO 200, kit lens


12800 ISO performers, kit lens:


Cute tiger cubs at ISO 400, kit lens. f8 seems to be it's sweet spot at 55mm:

[rustynail925]

Did you use some Post Processing in that last 3 pics you post??

[rawr]

Did you use some Post Processing in that last 3 pics you post??

I used Lightroom to export them as JPG's straight out of the Library. It works differently from Picasa in doing exports but I believe only some sharpening was applied after it resized them.

I've set the in-camera options so that no in-camera NR is supposed to kick in until the ISO is >1600, and only then on the 'light' setting, so the 2nd image would have had some in-camera NR applied, but none of the images had any NR or other PP deliberately applied by me.

The in-camera lens distortion and chromatic aberration correction was also on in all shots, fwiw.

Something to note about the clown and tiger images was that it was about 5pm in the afternoon ... the colours prob. reflect that - golden hour etc.

[ogl]

OK. Thank you very much for answers.
K-x is better than I've thought.

[rustynail925]

The colors looks great. Have you taken some daytime outdoors shots that you can post?

[Marc Sabatella]

While lots of people have been impressed by various high ISO samples from the K-x, your picture above of the musicians at ISO 12800 is the first to take *my* breath away.

[rawr]

The colors looks great. Have you taken some daytime outdoors shots that you can post?

Not yet, at least for example midday photos.

Both days I've taken photos with the K-x, I've started taking pictures only in the late afternoon - eg on the first day the scene looked like this - note the long shadows.

[rawr]

While lots of people have been impressed by various high ISO samples from the K-x, your picture above of the musicians at ISO 12800 is the first to take *my* breath away.

Thanks Marc - that's high praise!

Which is not to say that even with access to clean, decent high ISO it is impossible to take shit photos of stage performers or anywhere.

I've taken a lot of dud photos with the K-x, due to the usual suspects - crap focus, shutter speed too slow, too lazy to get up close etc.

I even bungled the best potential video I did - on the K-x monitor it looked OK but at home the main performer throughout the whole video was hopelessly out of focus. Damn!

Pic related.

ISO 3200, kit lens:

[Eruditass]

While lots of people have been impressed by various high ISO samples from the K-x, your picture above of the musicians at ISO 12800 is the first to take *my* breath away.

agreed - low NR, no PP??>? wow.

[rawr]

Yeah, in looking at that image again, even the in-camera NR that may have been applied is very subtle. Look at the detail still there on the speaker grille (behind the guy with the beard) or the accordian buttons, and the retained detail in both of the male performer's shirts.

You can see noise in the shadows, for sure, but it is very clean and 'fine grainy'. Any in-camera NR hasn't smudged away a huge amount of detail.

But the colours are looking a bit flat and the sharpness/horizontal resolution of the image has certainly begun to visibly suffer.

It's worth noting that with a better lens the result would probably have been a better image, of course. Not to mention had I used a tripod/monopod, rather than shot it handheld (like all of the photos here were done) it might have been sharper.

[h734790]

Wao! Can we see a bigger version of that ISO 12800 shot? Or at least a 100% crop?