My Pentax Q arrived on Wednesday, a full day sooner than expected. I had
planned to leave first thing that morning for a business trip, but was
delayed by a few hours and luckily was able to scoop up the camera and
lenses and take the kit with me as I headed out. I had a chance to test
drive it a bit and read the manual while I was away.
When I got home late last night the K to Q adapter was waiting for me.
Earlier today I went out looking for subjects to try with the Q and D-FA
100mm macro lens. I was thinking about the striking spider shots in the
post that Darren shared a while back. and by chance my garden provided
two large spiders to serve as photographic subjects.
So - here are my first macro shots with the Pentax Q:
http://www.markcassino.com/b2evolution/blog6.php/2012/09/01/two-spiders
The light today is quite flat as the remnants of Isaac roll through the
area, and this afternoon we had a pretty good rain, so no other chances
to take the system out.
A few comments on the Q:
- It is small and fun and the image quality is quite good. I'm very
impressed at how well it performs. Noise is much less of an issue than
I expected. The small sensor means low magnification of subject and
therefore lots of DOF, but for macro work that is a boon. I would not
use this as a portrait camera though.
- The Zoom lens is a joy to work with. Nicely dampened action, quality
built. I wish Pentax would build K mount lenses that are this solid.
- Pentax has done a great job of building a standard interface across
cameras. I picked up the Q and was shooting. Everything made sense. The
only thing I needed to look up in the manual was how to activate the MF
assist on the toy lenses.
- The Q with the kit lens or one of the small lenses is pretty much
pocketable. With the zoom, not so much so...
Regarding the lenses that I have (first impressions here) -
Stock 8mm f1.8 lens: Nice and sharp but barrel distortion is off
putting. Yes, I can enable distortion correction but I wish they had
produced a lens with less distortion. Has decent close focusing ability.
5 to 15mm Zoom - a joy to work with and very good results. Great all
round zoom.
Fisheye - I have a hard time focusing this even with MF assist enabled.
Looking at my shots, I always had my finger on the lens's focus ring
(and visible in the shot). Its a super cool ultra wide but takes some
getting used to (at least by me). Its a reminder that ultra wides can be
as difficult to work with as ultra telephotos.
Toy Telephoto - I only took a handful e of shots with this. I did not
see any Holga-like distortions but none of the shots I took were very
sharp. I assume that was operator error - I had not figured out how to
use the MF assist on toy lenses yet when I tried it. I need to give this
a more thorough testing.
I'll probably grab the "wide" toy lens and have a full set of lenses -
it would be nice if Pentax came out with some more Q lenses, but I'd be
surprised if they did.
Overall - this is a really cool and fun system, great IQ with the
attributes that you would expect from a small sensor re DOF .
Do any Q users have a recommendation re a good bag to carry a full Q Kit
in? This used bundle that I bought came with a case logic bag that holds
everything, but everything is jumbling around in the bag. The smallest
35mm SLR bag I have is about 2x too big and has partitions for lenses
that are many times the size of the Q lenses.
Mark
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