*isteve
Veteran Member
Hi all, I picked the K10, a K100 and all the pancakes up from Richard on Monday and had around a day and a half to play with them all. Shot around 400 frames on the K10 under a lot of quite difficult situations (high DR, into the sun, low light etc). I am not allowed to post any shots, but I can tell you about my impressions.
OVERALL
Firmware was 0.3, which I was assured was close to production but still being tweaked. There were some minor issues, such as a warmish tint in AWB/Sunny WB outdoors, but indoors and under tungsten it was pretty accurate. It is still being tuned so I expect the production version to be even better.
BATTERIES
Battery life seemed OK. I shot over 300 pics with lots of chimping and the batery indicator still read full. Spares are very cheap and available, so having one or two spares charged up seems like a reasonable compromise. I have no reason to doubt the estimates from Pentax of 500+ per charge and of course you can double this with the grip.
CONTROLS
Its a great camera to use. The controls all work well and have a solid, well engineered feel to them. The VF is excellent as expected, but the new LCD is great, much more accurate and much easier to see. Its atually quite useful for checking exposure, though I used blinkies for shadows/highlights rather than the histograms. Another WAY cool feature is being able to review the affect of image settings such as WB on the review screen. Now is that cool or what? Its a great way of adjusting WB for the conditions. Raw files can be converted quickly into JPEGs to save space if needed.
The only slight niggles included a rather stiff battery door. You have to give quite a tug on the catch since there is nowhere to insert a fingernail to pull the door open. This wasa test mule so it may have had some hard use over time. Also, the EV lock button was a tad awkward to locate with your thumb - I'm sure this is something you could get used to.
MODES
I tried out the Sv and TAv modes, and they work well - there is something quite groovy about watching the ISO go up and down as you expose! The ISO setting takes the place of the remaining shots counter in the LCD and VF. However I never really got on with them - what I did find FAR more useful was to assign EV comp to the front dial in Av mode - this puts up a permanent display of the EV setting and you can adjust it simply by twirling the front dial - excellent!!!! I also set auto ISO to 100 - 320 and shot away though you dont know what ISO it selected until you review the shot. I do wish the ISO display was permanent.
AF
There were still some odd focus stutters in very low light at very wide angles (12mm on the 12-24) but I never got any OOF shots and it didnt give up either. In half decent light its snappy and accurate. Its a great deal faster than anything Pentax have produced before as indeed is the whole camera.
RAW
I was restricted to shooting DNG because I didnt have any other RAW tools that would read the PEFs. I had to compress the DNGs using adobe DNG converter before Picasa could read them. However they worked fine uncompressed in adobe bridge and photoshop. The size of the uncompressed DNGs was 16.3 - 16.7 MB. They converted in camera to Jpegs which were about 3MB to 9MB depending on the detail and noise in the image.
IMAGE QUALITY
Wow. In terms of detail, the 25% increase in linear resolution is there, but to get it in context, you would still have to peep hard at an A3 print to see the difference. However what is VERY much improved is the sheer vibrancy and colour depth of the shots. What looks like a fairly flat single colour on the K100 seems to almost glow on the K10 showing far more liveliness and a range of shades. And yes, both were using natural image tone. In terms of DR at the ends of the range, I would say the K10 has a far more gradual tail off towards clipping at both the highlight and shadow end. There is textural detail in white surfaces and shadows that isnt visible on the K100. Its slight but its noticeable. Subjectively I would say there was about a stop more DR in the shadows as well. The K10 exposes about 1/3 to 1/2 a stop lower than the K100, but still retains more shadow detail.
More in part 2
--
Steve
Measurebating makes you short sighted.
http://www.pbase.com/steve_jacob
OVERALL
Firmware was 0.3, which I was assured was close to production but still being tweaked. There were some minor issues, such as a warmish tint in AWB/Sunny WB outdoors, but indoors and under tungsten it was pretty accurate. It is still being tuned so I expect the production version to be even better.
BATTERIES
Battery life seemed OK. I shot over 300 pics with lots of chimping and the batery indicator still read full. Spares are very cheap and available, so having one or two spares charged up seems like a reasonable compromise. I have no reason to doubt the estimates from Pentax of 500+ per charge and of course you can double this with the grip.
CONTROLS
Its a great camera to use. The controls all work well and have a solid, well engineered feel to them. The VF is excellent as expected, but the new LCD is great, much more accurate and much easier to see. Its atually quite useful for checking exposure, though I used blinkies for shadows/highlights rather than the histograms. Another WAY cool feature is being able to review the affect of image settings such as WB on the review screen. Now is that cool or what? Its a great way of adjusting WB for the conditions. Raw files can be converted quickly into JPEGs to save space if needed.
The only slight niggles included a rather stiff battery door. You have to give quite a tug on the catch since there is nowhere to insert a fingernail to pull the door open. This wasa test mule so it may have had some hard use over time. Also, the EV lock button was a tad awkward to locate with your thumb - I'm sure this is something you could get used to.
MODES
I tried out the Sv and TAv modes, and they work well - there is something quite groovy about watching the ISO go up and down as you expose! The ISO setting takes the place of the remaining shots counter in the LCD and VF. However I never really got on with them - what I did find FAR more useful was to assign EV comp to the front dial in Av mode - this puts up a permanent display of the EV setting and you can adjust it simply by twirling the front dial - excellent!!!! I also set auto ISO to 100 - 320 and shot away though you dont know what ISO it selected until you review the shot. I do wish the ISO display was permanent.
AF
There were still some odd focus stutters in very low light at very wide angles (12mm on the 12-24) but I never got any OOF shots and it didnt give up either. In half decent light its snappy and accurate. Its a great deal faster than anything Pentax have produced before as indeed is the whole camera.
RAW
I was restricted to shooting DNG because I didnt have any other RAW tools that would read the PEFs. I had to compress the DNGs using adobe DNG converter before Picasa could read them. However they worked fine uncompressed in adobe bridge and photoshop. The size of the uncompressed DNGs was 16.3 - 16.7 MB. They converted in camera to Jpegs which were about 3MB to 9MB depending on the detail and noise in the image.
IMAGE QUALITY
Wow. In terms of detail, the 25% increase in linear resolution is there, but to get it in context, you would still have to peep hard at an A3 print to see the difference. However what is VERY much improved is the sheer vibrancy and colour depth of the shots. What looks like a fairly flat single colour on the K100 seems to almost glow on the K10 showing far more liveliness and a range of shades. And yes, both were using natural image tone. In terms of DR at the ends of the range, I would say the K10 has a far more gradual tail off towards clipping at both the highlight and shadow end. There is textural detail in white surfaces and shadows that isnt visible on the K100. Its slight but its noticeable. Subjectively I would say there was about a stop more DR in the shadows as well. The K10 exposes about 1/3 to 1/2 a stop lower than the K100, but still retains more shadow detail.
More in part 2
--
Steve
Measurebating makes you short sighted.
http://www.pbase.com/steve_jacob
