Exclusive: I have just posted a gallery of 25 sample images from a production Pentax *ist D. This is in advance of completing our full review which should be up within the next two weeks. So far the *ist D is looking quite good, there are two sides to the *ist D's image quality story. Firstly tonal balance and color response are both good, a natural color response and lifted shadow detail with highlight clipping at about the same point as most other digital SLR's. Noise is also quite low, about the same as the Nikon D100 (which is what we'd expect as they both share the same sensor). The other side is that Pentax has clearly chosen a low sharpening approach, at 100% view most images have a soft look but do sharpen well and can be delivered sharper out of the camera by pushing up in-camera sharpening. The lenses available to me meant I was most likely to be shooting 'wide open' and thus have less sharp images as a consequence. Overall the *ist D is looking 'so far so good'.

Pentax *ist D Samples Gallery

There are 25 images in the samples gallery. Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter / magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). I make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review), I do so in good faith, don't abuse it.

Unless otherwise noted images taken with no particular settings at 6mp image size. Images downsampled to fit into 1024 x 1024 bounds to fit in your browser, as always the original untouched image is available by clicking on a link below the reduced image.

Pentax *ist D Samples Gallery (25 images) - posted 22/Sep/2003

Click here for our Pentax *ist D Preview