Since I bought my first point-and-shoot digital camera back in 2003, I’ve been getting more interested in photography. After I wore that cute little Canon out, I switched to a Fuji S5200 superzoom. Then, I ran into some of that camera’s limitations: the small sensor, the slow-to-clear buffer, the excruciatingly slow RAW performance, just to name a few.
I began looking at the usual suspects from Canon and Nikon before discovering the nice little Olympus E-Volt 420. Then I got really lucky when a co-worker suggested Pentax.
Granted, Pentax isn’t the first name to pop to mind in digital cameras. And that’s a shame, because I think that they make far and away the best entry-level D-SLR. I wound up with one of last year’s, a K100D-Super. I scored it for $349 for the body only, and added an 18-55 mm zoom lens for $100.
Okay, you must be wondering why I liked the K100D-S better than Canon and Nikon, the industry standards. Here are the big points that stood out:
-Construction quality. Just feel the Pentax. It’s weighty and has a far less plastic-like feel.
-6.1 megapixels. That’s less than a lot of others. For me, that’s a benefit. That means I can get more on an SD card. It’s unlikely that I’d print anything at full 12-megapixel size, anyway. Give me the extra room.
-In-body image stabilizer. This means I can score awesome deals on cheap old K-Mount lenses!
-Relatively small, just slightly larger than the Olympus eVolt and that wild Panasonic Lumix.
Also, I like [...]
Olympus
Making the Leap to an SLR
Cameras: Just as important as a plane ticket
The best souvenir you can bring home is a great photo. And New Zealand looks like it will give me a lot of incredible photos. There’s just one little problem – my poor old Fuji S5200 superzoom has been through a lot of hard knocks, from deserts to temperatures well below freezing. It’s showing its age a bit, with some shots starting to lose sharpness, and a power button that often gets sticky and balks at firing the camera up. It seems that over the last year, the Fuji has gotten particularly bad at high ISO settings.
The Fuji could probably survive New Zealand, but I don’t want to fly 15 hours and have it die. Or worse yet, just take mediocre shots of stellar scenery. So it’s time for a new one … and I decided long ago that I was ready for a digital SLR. The first one I considered was the Olympus E420, the smallest SLR in all the land (and the one that uses the same xD cards as my Fuji). My co-worker, Alex Scott (who is a most-excellent graphic designer and artist), steered me toward Pentax, which is making some impressive stuff. I gave Canon and Nikon their due, but I just wasn’t impressed with the plastic-like, somewhat flimsy feel of their entry and intermediate-level cameras. Sony wasn’t a consideration since I just don’t like their controls and layouts. I thought about Fuji, but they just didn’t have what I wanted in my price range. Believe it [...]
