Pentax Life

“Its ridiculously small and lightweight for a 100mm lens. It has great image quality & bokeh and relatively fast. It shoots telephoto images almost as well as macros and the close minimum focus distance means you can keep getting closer and closer to your subject. I almost prefer it over my 77 Limited mainly because of the close minimum focus distance. The difference of 1 1/2 stops is significant but then so is the 15″ difference in focus distance.“

This is the quote from the short “review” of Pentax-D FA 100mm F2.8 Macro lens by Alvaro Lopez. And his photographs made with *istDS + DFA 100mm Macro says by itself.

It seems to be that the firmware 1.0 for Pentax K10D is finally out. Japanese website Impress Watch have a short review of K10D + DA 16-45 F4 lens with a lot of full size samples (translated by Google). Look at the EXIF - software ver. 1.0.

Noise is a hard to spot up to ISO 400. You should look very close to spot any deviation from perfection. ISO 800 is pretty usable too. And the ISO 1600 is much better than Sony A100 which is based on the same sensor.

Some other samples shows excellent dynamic range (thanks to 22-bit A/D converter) with the plenty of details and exceptional sharpness in lights and shadows.

Image copyright SAMSUNG TECHWIN CO., LTD.
Click the image above to see the full size photo

Sample photos made with Samsung GX10 DSLR camera officially available now at the Samsung Camera website. Firmware version in EXIF is 1.0

Pentax K10D preview was posted at the Japanese website kakaku.com (automatically translated). In the first part of the preview the main features of the K10D are described (one more time) along with the short interview with the Pentax’s representatives Hisashi Tatamiya and Isamu Hirai covering 22 bit A/D converter, PRIME engine, SR, dust reduction and weather resistant body sealing. Mr. Tatamiya said that the new exposure modes Sv and TAv are the logical step forward from the film camera concept. In DSLR cameras sensitivity could be changed on the fly and became the 3rd main exposure control. In sensitivity priority mode (Sv) you can control ISO settings by the rear wheel and the aperture value or the shutter speed with the front wheel. And the current ISO value is visible in the viewfinder and on the top LCD all the time. In TAv mode camera choices the best sensitivity for correct exposure by the aperture value and shutter speed. Mr. Hirai added that the high ISO noise could turn to help reproduce a special atmosphere on the printed photograph, make it more film like.

The second part describes new exposure modes with the viewfinder shots and photos (full size, but without EXIF info) made in this modes. Part 3 covers Hyper Program and Hyper Manual modes with the full size samples as well.

Part 4 is about in-camera RAW processing. You can check out in-camera processed samples with and without various processing settings applied. And finally, there are half a dozen of sample shots made by Kazunori Kawada on a K10D with the three Limited lenses mounted: DA 21mm F3.2, DA 40mm F2.8 and DA 70mm F2.4.

Sinahua from DPreview have posted full size high ISO samples from the preproduction Pentax K10D with DA 18-55 on it taken at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. Four images (1, 2, 3, 4) were taken indoors in Aperture priority mode with ISO sensitivity settings set at 1600, F/5.6, exposure from 1/45 to 1/90. All files are smaller then 1Mb in size - it means heavy JPEG compression.

While the noise level is very acceptable the moire artifacts (red parabola-like lines on one guy’s shirt at the right 100% cropped image) are visible. Some kind of moire is also noticeable on the one of the official K10D samples at ISO 100. So it’s really an issue of K10D’s low-pass filter and Pentax will not minimize it in trade for image details and sharpness as Pentax’s reps told for many times already.

Update: Portrait with Pentax K10D + DA 16-45 F4 at ISO 1600 form Alex123 (rotated in ACDSee, the same version 0.32 beta firmware).

Update: Ned Bunnell have posted some portraits made with K10D + FA 31mm f1.8 Limited at ISO 200, 400, 800, 1600. Images shot in RAW and processed to JPEGs with no adjustments to color, saturation, sharpness etc.

Update: K10D + 50mm F/1.4 at ISO 200 sample crops from Ned Bunnell. Astonishing details!

Another high ISO shots from the pre-production Samsung GX-10 DSLR (K10D clone). First, the downsized night shots from the Korean forum SLRCLUB.COM - ISO 400, 800, 1600 - all shoot handheld with Shake Reduction on. And some more pics were posted by DPreview user ANNA yj. The most interesting is 100% close-up crop at ISO 800. ANNA yj said that it was taken by the tester in Korea with GX10 firmware version 0.32 (or 0.34 as in the quoted EXIF table in Korean?).

Update: ISO Priority mode test (downsized samples) from Korean tester nicknamed ‘film user’: ISO 100, 125, 160, 200, 250; ISO 320, 400, 500, 640; ISO 1000, 1250, 1600.

Japanese website All About have published the brief Pentax K10D “review” (original article in Japanese: page 1, page 2, automatically translated by Google: page 1, page 2) along with several downsized photos taken with it (thanks to DPreview forums user Susumu for the link). As you can conclude from the machine translation the reviewers - Kazunori Kawada (photographer who was talking about using K10D at the recent Pentax talk shows) and Yasuhiro Tsuchida - are happy with the results they’ve got.

Some more downsized samples (with the terrible JPEG compression) could be found on the blog of the Japanese photographer Tanaka (1, 2, 3). He is pleased with this camera as well.

Unfortunately, all the pictures in this reviews are too small to make any conclusions on the image quality. This mean that firmware version 1.0 is still in work and no full size samples will be available until it’s final release. Also any mentions of K10D availability in early November have been removed from the product page at the Pentax Imaging website. So, no final K10Ds till the end of November? But the people in the Pentax Imaging Technical Support says that “We are EXPECTING the K10D to be released by mid-November“.

DPreview forums user mskad have posted the Pentax DA 70mm F2.4 Limited and Pentax FA 77mm F1.8 Limited bokeh comparison. Three pairs of photos are speaking by themselves. Both lenses are excellent but the old FA 77mm has a little better, smoother, more beautiful bokeh.

Here you can download two full size photos made with Samsung GX10 at ISO1600 sensitivity. This samples are from the preproduction camera with firmware version 0.20. Both shots were taken indoors.

I have tried to find some similar shots (ISO1600, indoors) made with Sony Alpha A100 and Nikon D80 which are the main competitors to the Samsung GX10/Pentax K10D and put them side by side. Also comparison with the previous Samsung’s 6Mp DSLR GX-1S would be interesting too.

Of cause, the “test” is far from scientific. It’s impossible to find photos made with other cameras in the same conditions and of the same subjects. But this fact could not prevent me from making some “pre” conclusions. The first thing that catch my eye is the very fine grain of the GX10. It looks like noise reduction works in a very merciful manner. Shots by A100/D80 are smoother but contains more noise reduction artifacts. I can’t say that GX10’s picture is worse but obviously not better - it’s just different.

The second thing is that the GX10 is not significantly noisier than the GX-1S (a.k.a. Pentax *istDS2). It’s amazing considering larger GX-1S’s sensor elements.

Don’t forget that this is preproduction firmware 0.20 - noise reduction could be changed dramatically in the version 1.0.

IXBT forum user Serenki have posted some photos made with Pentax *istDS + Pentax FA 77mm F1.8 lens. I like the gorgeous bokeh effect in this picture. The foliage in the out of DOF areas looks stunning. Perspective is very deep. All pictures looks very 3D.