Yippie! The box from B&H was on my porch when I got home today - Inside
was a Panda-Bear white K-01, DA-XS 40mm f 2.8, extra battery and SD
card. I think this camera will be excellent for snow crsytal shots - I
just put in my snow crystal setup and did some test shows. It is
sleeting now and too warm for snow, but as I hoped the focus peaking
made it very easy to focus despite the extreme macro and shallow DOF. As
with the Q I could not get the flash to stay in manual mode.
Fortunately in the last few days I cobbled together a PC cord setup that
by passes the TTL functions altogether, so I can use the flash in manual
no problem.
Pentax has done a good job of sticking to a standard control layout, and
even though the K-01 is a little different with only one control wheel,
everything falls into to place very intuitively. I did have to look up
how to activate focus peaking. I think that the focus peaking and
ability to zoom into the frame for focusing - far more than the Pentax Q
- will make this a great tool for snow crystals and other extreme macro
photography.
The 40mm lens is small. Haven't tested it out yet. I did put in my Mz-S
and shot out a short roll of Tri-X - the vignetting looked fabulous
through the finder. Discovered that the built in flash on my Mz-S is
dead. Crap - these film cameras keep fading away....
For my specific intended purpose I thing that the K-01 will be great. It
was 60F when I left for work this morning, 35F when I drove home, and
high tomorrow is predicted to be 18F. (That would be 15, 2, and -8 C)
Lots of snow coming so I hope to give this setup a good workout.
As far as general purpose shooting goes... I have to say I look at the
K-01 and think "WTF?" I was skeptical about the Q but the moment I
picked it up it up I thought "Wow!" The K-01... Well....
Mark
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
PDML@pdml.net
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
