Hello, K200D
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008After a disastrous cleaning experience with the K100D, I purchased the Pentax K200D. It arrived yesterday, but true to form, I couldn’t open it and play with it until Mike Autry got off work (we’ve kind of gone through this newbie SLR thing together). The light wasn’t quite good enough at 11pm to manage any good shots, so I took it out this morning for some emo flower shots.
First thoughts:
Camera: It’s sturdier than the K100D. The buttons require actual pressing. This will come in handy when I’m doing wacky holding methods for my 365 (I was constantly accidentally turning the camera off when I was trying to trigger the shutter with my pinky finger). All the hinged doors feel like they’re attached better. The button to remove the lens is really smooth. The menus make much more sense, although I kind of miss the silly acronyms on the K100D. Everything is more customizable - white balance, auto-ISO range, color dynamics (there’s even a spiderwebby thing you can move around, although frankly I have no idea how rotating the spiderweb affects the color), etc. etc. Auto-focus is definitely faster and seems to be accurate. I haven’t actually read the manual yet.
Photos: Holy crap, they’re huge. I’m glad I got an external hard drive last week. Since Lightroom doesn’t support PEF files yet, I’m shooting DNG, which are larger. That translates into only (gasp!) 120 photos per 2GB card. But the photos themselves are marvelous to behold. The resolution is just amazing. There’s a lot more depth to them, so much so that I didn’t use any presets when I processed these today - just tweaks for the contrast, vibrance, saturation, a little green channel adjustments (I’m not sure why, but I had to do that in a few of these). I added vignetting because most of the backgrounds were pretty blah. Otherwise, I’m really happy with how these look, particularly since the shooting conditions were impossible (30 mph winds, any one? Seriously.).
