Pentax Life

Impress Watch have published interesting photo of three lenses by Samsung which are undoubtedly the same as Pentax DA* line. There is the misprint on that page: 60-250 lens is F4 not F2.8.

Image courtesy Impress Watch Corporation, an Impress Group company

Rumors says that this lenses (Pentax and now Samsung) were co-developed with Tokina. Click here to view the full size samples of Tokina AT-X 535 PRO DX 50-135mm F2.8 lens.

Update: New Tokina 50-135mm F2.8 lens (and probably other two co-developed with Pentax) will not be available for K-mount. Only for Canon and Nikon.

According to PDML user Thibault Massart aka Thibouille (you can reach him at DPreview forums as well), Pentax K10D proprietary Lithium battery is actually widely available (and cheaper - priced around $20 USD) Minolta NP-400.

Shel, a rep at the Pentax booth at Photokina told me (and was not supposed to so I won’t say his/her name) that those batteries for the K10D are the same as Minolta **-400. Don’t remind the first letters but according to the quick search I did on google they may be NP-400 which you should be able to find easily (and cheaper) than from Pentax.

Ken Takeshita sent to Pentax-Discuss Mail List interesting figures he encountered in one of the Japanese forums. They are the manufacturers’ planned production at the time of the launch.

• Pentax *istDL - 20 000
• Pentax *istDS - 6 000
• Pentax *istDS2 - 4 000
• Pentax *istDL2 -3 000
• Pentax K100D - 15 000
• Sony α100 - 80 000
• Nikon D200 - 40 000
• Canon 20D - 50 000
• Nikon D70 - 70 000
• Nikon D50 - 140 000
• Canon KissD (a.k.a. 300D a.k.a. Rebel) - 70 000
• Canon KissDN (a.k.a. 350D a.k.a. Rebel XT) - 130 000

The following information provided by Russian Pentax dealer Pentar. Yuri Bukhvalov, Pentar Corp. said at Russian Penta-Club forum:

1. You could be able to use AA batteries in D-BG2 battery grip but Pentax will not recommend it because of lower voltage of NiMH AA. It could cause camera to turn-off suddenly. Power indicator will not work properly as well.
2. PowerZoom will be functional with the old PowerZoom lenses but with some restrictions. IE automatic lens-retract-to-shortest-size and other features will not work.
3. K10D kit with 18-55 lens will be priced 1000 Euros at Russian market (I guess that price in Europe will be the same). Also double kit (18-55 + 50-200) will be available.
4. First K10Ds will be delivered to Europe in October/November and some later to America. The first supplies expected in Russia till December.

Update: Thanks to Edvinas at DPreview forum for translation correction.