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January 26, 2007
[ REVIEW—Pentax K10D DSLR ]
Pentax K10D digital slr with Pentax 16-45 lens
Price: $1900
Highly recommended
The low-down: This 10.2 megapixel camera is Pentax’s entry into the market segment currently held by Nikon’s D200 and Canon’s 30D. The Pentax is considerably cheaper than the competition and has a greater feature set than either.
The body is high impact plastic over a metal frame and it is weather-proofed. The in-camera image stabilisation and the automatic dust removal are not found on the competition.
All the fundamentals of the camera -- exposure, white balance and in camera processing -- are excellent. Pentax is to be congratulated for adopting Adobe’s universal DNG RAW format which mates the camera to Photoshop well. There is a dedicated RAW button on the camera body that saves plunging into menus or quality settings when you want to quickly swap from jpeg to RAW.
The viewfinder is exemplary, large and bright and easy to use even with spectacles.
The Pentax lens is superb but most shops will be selling the K10D with a Sigma lens. You will need to specify the lens if you want the Pentax.
Like: The white balance fine tuning in this camera is a thing of beauty. If you take a photo, say under incandescent light, and you don’t like the look of it, simply go into white balance fine tuning immediately and you will see the last photo you have just taken on the LCD screen, overlaid with a grid showing colour temperature variations on two axes. Move the cursor dot in one direction or another and watch the colour of the image change. When it looks right set the selection and take another photo!
Dislike: The mirror/shutter slap is not as sweet as it might be.
Verdict: The Pentax K10D is a brilliant camera. At the price it is a world-beater. It will be interesting to see how it goes in the market place where, paradoxically, its low price may count against it. Can a $1900 camera/lens combination compete with a similarly specified camera selling for $3000? Yes, it can. It is as though Pentax has returned to its origins when the company produced affordable, reliable, pioneering SLRs with outstanding lenses. Most serious amateurs have a Pentax in their past and the K10D will bring a nostalgic smile of recognition.
Sample images from the Pentax K10D here >>
Posted by terry at 02:52 AM | Comments (40) | TrackBack
[ REVIEW—Panasonic Lumix L1 ]
Panasonic Lumix L1 digital single lens reflex
Price: $3849
Highly Recommended
The low-down: This 7.5 megapixel camera is Panasonic’s first digital single lens reflex. It is also sold as a Leica.
Leica influence on design is apparent in the austere retro look and feel together with its high quality of construction. Lens aperture is controlled with a traditional barrel ring and shutter speed is set with a knob that has the shutter release in its centre. To set the camera to program exposure mode the ring and the knob are both set to A. Turning one or the other control away from A puts the camera into either aperture priority or shutter priority. It is an elegant and intuitive arrangement.
The L1 is built on some Olympus technology -- the Four Thirds sensor/lens combination and the horizontally arranged reflex viewer with a split to the “live view” LCD screen, providing an alternative to the eye level viewfinder.
The outstanding feature is the lens which is branded Leica and is the best kit lens we have seen. The startlingly high price of this 7.5mp camera can be justified by the 14-50mm f2.8-3.5 zoom lens. (This is 28-100mm film equivalent -- with the Four Thirds system the focal length is doubled.)
Focus is instantaneous and pin sharp. Exposure and colour are excellent and the tonal qualities of photographs are superb. We didn’t detect either excessive noise or intrusive noise reduction.
Like: The image stabilised Leica lens has not been made down to a price but up to a very high standard of optical and mechanical perfection. It is in a class of its own.
Dislike: The viewfinder is the Achilles heel of this camera. It is small and dim due to the use of mirrors rather than a prism and, perhaps, due to stealing light for the useless “live view” option on the LCD.
Verdict: The Panasonic is a difficult camera to rate because of the price. The Olympus E330, with which it shares components, sells for about $1800 but doesn’t have a comparable lens. The Nikon D200, with a better viewfinder, more pixels but lesser optic sells for $2900. The Lumix L1 is highly recommended because it is a fine camera but whether it is value for money will be for the customer to decide. In the US the price is already dropping.
Sample images from the Lumix L1 here >>
Posted by terry at 02:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[ SOMETHING FOR NOTHING ]
BELIEVE IT OR NOT it is sometimes possible to get something for nothing in the digital photography business. And we’re not just talking about applets like Irfanview or Picassa.
Right now Adobe Lightroom beta 4.1 is available for download from the Adobe web site., but only until 28 February. Once the release version goes on sale the free download will stop.
Lightroom is, you might say, a digital darkroom. Clever name! In Lightroom it is possible to adjust colour temperature, exposure, contrast, brightness, sharpness and so on, just like in RAW conversion software except that in this program you can give jpegs, tiffs or whatever the same post-camera treatment and it is a RAW converter as well.
Just about everything that can be done in Lightroom can also be done in Photoshop but Lightroom is a dedicated image processing tool whereas Photoshop is a design application. Lightroom is faster and altogether better designed for doing one job and doing it well.
Adobe is also offering the next version of Photoshop, called Photoshop CS3, for download in beta form.
To use this for more than two days you must be a registered owner of CS2 and the final release of CS3 is expected in late autumn.
CS3 has some new features, most notable being Smart Layers, Refine Edges and one-click black and white conversion.
With Smart Layers (or Objects) a filter can be applied to a layer that is non-destructive. Suppose you apply Unsharp Mask and later decide that the layer is either over or under sharpened the effect can be adjusted or deleted because it exists only as an instruction set “under” the layer.
The one-click black and white conversion tool is truly brilliant. Photoshop makes its own guess at best conversion and then brings up a dialogue box in which each colour channel can be adjusted individually.
Refine Edges is something we have needed since Photoshop v1. With this procedure fine adjustments can be made to the edges of a selection, such as feather, expand, contract and contrast and the image live view changes when the sliders are moved.
The Photoshop interface has been changed slightly to make it consistent with Windows Vista.
Speaking of Windows, Mr Gates is also being generous to digi snappers. If you maintain a blog for sharing photos then you should download the Microsoft Windows Live Writer beta. Imaging has used the standard editing program for Moveable Type blog software and found it a painfully cumbersome affair. With Live Writer you get a drag and drop program which shares keyboard shortcuts with Word. To insert pictures onto a page simply drag them to the place where you want them and use the alignment buttons to place them left, right or centre in relation to text.
There is a quick resizing routine and an automatic assumption that the picture is to link to something else. Left to its own devices Live Writer assumes a link and it also assumes that you want a drop shadow box around the picture. These defaults are over-ridden with one button click.
There is no suggestion of an expiry date on the Microsoft beta.
Betas, by their very nature, are unfinished programs, but that doesn’t mean that they are dangerously bug ridden. They are functioning programs released to the computer community by companies that use this method for cheap and comprehensive testing. If you find a bug you are invited to report it but no one will come around and smash your computer if you just use the betas as though they are full releases.
(www.dpexpert.com.au is maintained using Windows Live Writer)
Posted by terry at 02:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 09, 2007
[ THE HOLIDAY TEST BENCH ]
DPEXPERT's equipment reviews and articles are spin-offs from columns written for The Age Livewire section and the Sydney Morning Herald technology website. This means that we can't post full reviews here until they have first appeared in The Age/SMH.
Right now Livewire is appearing in a shrunken holiday form so there Is no Imaging section, but that doesn't mean we have been idle! Oh no! We have been busy, busy, busy.
The Pentax K10D has been and gone through our hands and the full review will appear in February.
What did we think of it? Amazing value for money. A 10.2mp camera with in-body image stabilisation, auto dust removal, a brilliant white balance fine-tuning system, mirror lock-up and DNG as one of its native RAW formats.
We tried the camera with a Pentax 16-45mm lens which is an excellent optic. Note the modest zoom range — there is nothing ostentatious about this lens, it is simply top construction and optical quality.
The Pentax K10D plus Pentax 16–45 lens has a RRP of $1899. This is a real challenge to Nikon and Canon who cannot match Pentax in this price range.
The Panasonic Lumix L1 is also in dpexpert's hands at the moment. This is the first digital single lens reflex from Panasonic and is a product of collaboration between Panasonic, Leica and Olympus.
The L1 uses the four/thirds lens/sensor combination originally developed by Olympus and Kodak. The sensor in the L1 has 7.4mp and the lens carries the Leica name although we presume it is not made in Germany.
Wherever it is made it is a superb optic. In fact it is so good that it almost justifies the extraordinary price that is asked for the camera. At about $3800 this looks like a camera priced well above what the market will bear, considering that inside it is pretty much an Olympus E330 and has the shortcomings of that camera.
The achilles heel of the Panasonic and the Olympus is the small, incredibly dim viewfinder. This is a result of the decision to fit these cameras with so-called "live view" LCD screens, making them the only DSLRs that use the LCD screen as an optional viewfinder. This is achieved by doing away with the prism in the viewfinder and replacing it with mirrors arranged horizontally. The image is split between the optical viewfinder and the "live view" sensor. It is the answer to a technological question that no one asked.
Apart from that the Lumix L1 is beautifully made [there is a Leica badged version of the camera – the badge will set you back about $1000! snobbery is not cheap] with the shutter speed and aperture dials exactly where they should be on a camera. There is no body-top LCD function read-out which is a pity.
But that lens! There is no other kit lens anything like it. Images from the L1 are gorgeous.
[Panasonic Lumix L1 sample images]
The Sigma 18—200mm lens looks too good to be true. But this compact zoom works extremely well. It is well made and has surprisingly moderate distortion at both ends of the range. Keep in mind that this is the equivalent of a 27—300mm zoom on a 35mm camera and you get some idea of the achievement of the designers and manufacturers.
Construction quality is good and it is mechanically smooth. Auto-focus is so-so for speed but spot on for accuracy.
The down-side? It is slow — f6.3 at its longest extension.
*
Posted by terry at 11:05 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack