DVPhoto

DPReview have their K10D review up now, and it is definitely worth the read.

It seems Pentax may well have a winner here, though not so much a winner that Canon and Nikon have to worry. From the perspective of a photo taking device, it is simply superior to everything in its price range. I won’t go into the long list of features, you can read about them at DPReview; but it seems that Pentax have thought of so many little features that help the photographer out in the field, that one has to wonder what the other players design teams have been doing during the last few years.

Then comes the image…

In this day and age of pixel peeping at 100% on large LCD’s, a camera is going to be judged first and foremost on its image quality! The K10D unfortunately seems to fall down in its jpeg image output, with the images being noticeably softer than the competition. Thankfully this disappears when shooting in RAW, and using ACR to process the RAW images produce nice sharp images that compete well with the competition. Since I shoot RAW almost exclusively, this wouldn’t be a show stopper for me, but I’m sure it would for others.

Then there is the dynamic range of the camera. It’s a full stop less than all of its competition, and that is not something you want. With blown highlights in digital looking so terrible, dynamic range is incredibly important, and to drop from 8 to 7 stops of light recorded will be the death of many shots taken.

I’m sure that many people will love this camera, and with it’s selection of pancake lenses and its upcoming supersonic range, the camera will no doubt bring Pentax back into the digital war. But it hasn’t made me regret having a Canon.

Edit: Luminous Landscape have another review (much less technical much more photographer oriented).

So often I’ve heard that digital cameras, at least DSLRs, are too expensive; and that “film” (I assume they mean 35mm here) is much cheaper.

Well that is such bullshit! The Voigtlander Vito CL I bought online a few weeks back was definitely cheap. Though older than me, it had been unused in its box its entire life, so was essentially brand new. It cost less than all but the cheapest of digital point and shoots and seemed like an amazingly good deal.

Now several weeks later the cost of the film we’ve bought, as well as the processing, has surpassed the actual cost of the camera. The dark room equipment I rescued from my fathers garage will keep the costs of making a darkroom down, but there will be many things I do still need to buy/replace.

Now this doesn’t come as a surprise to me as I did do enough research before diving into film. Yet you still see people saying digital is too expensive and film is much cheaper. I calculate that within a year, the cost of my film equipment will have surpassed that of the digital, and that is including the cost of my computer in with the digital camera.

Thankfully I didn’t get into film to save money.