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Forum: Film SLRs and Compact Film Cameras
12-05-2010, 01:40 PM
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| Pros | very small & light Cons | AF points too close together Rating | 8 Price (U.S. Dollars) | $116 Years Owned | 2 months |
I can recommend this camera: Yes
Value, Features, Performance & Size
Highly customizable, great for people who have their own darkrooms, certainly offers any feature a shooter could desire.
Tiny size makes it a real gem if you will be carrying it long distances. Looks great with FA lenses in silver.
Camera Review
This camera does pretty much anything you could ask of a camera. I really expected to love it. It's so tiny and lightweight, and I bought it to be my carry-around camera that wouldn't weigh my purse down.
It takes lovely pictures, I ran a few rolls through it. I was a bit surprised the first time I opened it, because I'd never used a camera where the film loads from the right and spools to the left before. That was not a big deal, just something that got my attention.
It has lots of customizable features, like whether you want the film completely rewound or with the leader hanging out, so clearly it is meant for both the casual user and the person doing his/her own darkroom work. I was really impressed by all the ways to customize the camera operation, and it was fairly simple to do. (You can, for instance, turn off the focus beep if you are shooting wildlife.)
I did not care for the focal points. They are so close together I ended up just using centerpoint focus, even though I am used to toggling focal points on my K20. There hardly seemed to be a point to toggling with this camera, so I didn't bother, choosing instead to focus and recompose. It made me wonder why it had so many focal points. I also found the option to lock it to centerpoint just weird and redundant--using that means you can't recompose or it will refocus on whatever is now in the center.
I have tiny hands (I wear a size 4 ring) and this camera was a good size for me, but I actually missed having a larger camera. I don't know how a person with larger hands might feel. I liked it in some ways, but it did feel less substantial (but didn't make my purse cut into my shoulder, so that was a good feature overall).
Really, this camera offers everything a person could want in an SLR, and it's small size is a real plus if you will be walking around a lot or wish to carry it with you all the time. I ended up preferring the PZ-1 I also bought, but I can't pinpoint exactly why. I wanted to prefer this camera because it's so small, but we just didn't click. :p
Here are a couple of photos taken with the *ist 35 mm. The one with the skull is autofocus and the one with the car was my stab at manual focus.
on the farm | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Alas, poor Bessie, I knew her well... | Flickr - Photo Sharing! |
