Better, Yet Smaller: The Pentax K-7

In the summer of 2009, the K20D was supplanted at the top of Pentax's DSLR lineup by the new K-7. While it had an APS-C sensor with in-body Shake Reduction and a 14MP resolution just like its predecessor, the new camera was smaller and more rugged, with a magnesium body shell and better cold-weather resistance.

Top shutter speed bumped from 1/4000th to 1/8000th of a second, and it was rated for 100,000 activations.

Like before, there's "TAv" position on the mode dial. This allows you to set your preferred aperture and shutter speed and the camera will automatically adjust ISO to compensate. There's also the "Sv" mode to allow you to use the rear dial to adjust ISO on the fly. The other modes are the same as you'd expect. The top panel LCD can be briefly illuminated blue by rotating the power switch past the "ON" position.

Despite the K-7 being physically smaller than its predecessor, the rear LCD screen has grown from 2.7" on the K20D to a full 3" on the newer camera. This required relocating the vertical stack of buttons that used to live on the left side of the monitor. The relocation was done sensibly, with the playback-mode-only "Play" and "Trash" buttons moving to the upper left, and "Info" and "Menu" moving over to the right with the other menu navigation and activation buttons.

Despite all these improvements, MSRP for the K-7 was $1,150, which was over a hundred bucks cheaper than its forebear, and one of the best deals of the cameras in the category.

The Professional's Choice: The Nikon D300

Released at almost the same time as the Canon EOS 40D, the initial MSRP of the Nikon D300 was five hundred bucks higher, a more than 35% jump. The difference was that Nikon had already sliced the DSLR marked more finely than Canon had. Where Nikon had three tiers of cameras (“entry”, “upper entry”, and “enthusiast”) beneath its D300, the EOS 40D had to satisfy everyone too cool to buy a Rebel but not well-heeled enough for a full-frame 5D.

The D300 was launched at the same time as the D3 pro camera and, while it didn’t have the full-frame sensor or built-in vertical grip, it used Nikon’s pro control layout and rugged, weather-resistant construction. It also replaced the 10MP CCD sensor of its D200 predecessor with a new 12MP CMOS sensor, backed with Nikon’s new EXPEED image processor.

When I say that it uses Nikon's "pro control layout", the photo above is what I'm referring to. The pro cameras from Nikon (and Canon and Olympus) don't have a mode dial, like on consumer/hobbyist-oriented cameras, where the PASM modes often share space with Portrait, Landscape, Sports, et cetera. Instead you select among Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual by holding a mode button and spinning a dial. Similarly, controls like ISO and White Balance tend to be located where they're easy to access on the fly without having to dive into a menu on the screen.

The top panel's LCD screen has all the data you'd need about the camera's settings viewable at a glance when you power it up.

The power switch is the same one Nikon's been using across their DSLR and MILC lines pretty much universally for yoinks now, unlike Canon, who seem to want to experiment with a new location for the switch every so often. Right next to it, easily reached by the shooter's index finger, are the Mode and Exposure Compensation buttons.

The pentaprism viewfinder is bright, contains all the shooting info you need, and has true 100% coverage, as opposed to its predecessor's 95% coverage finder. Where the D200 had a 2.5" screen on the back, the D300 has a 3" LCD with more than 3X the pixel count. The controls are laid out in typical Nikon fashion. The little rotating latch with the Pac-Man pictogram at lower right is the remote release for the memory card door. The D300 records to a single CF card slot.

It has an in-body focus motor, allowing it to make use of older Nikon autofocus glass as well as newer lenses. The only new F-mount glass is can't handle are the lenses with electromagnetically-controlled apertures.

The D300 was expensive, but it was pretty much the state of the art in APS-C cameras circa 2008. Unless you need to shoot video or simply must have live view, there's no reason you couldn't put it to work today.

Big Little Camera: The Olympus E-3

Olympus was unique among the big camera makers in that they had not pursued autofocus technology in their interchangeable lens single lens reflex cameras, and therefore when they designed their first digital SLR they were essentially starting from a clean sheet of paper.

Since they didn't have to accommodate an existing lens mount and its associated library of glass, they were free to use a physically smaller sensor, working with Eastman Kodak to create the Four Thirds System.

This allowed for small cameras and small lenses and this was hyped for their early consumer and enthusiast DSLRs, but which probably came back to bite them in the butt when the E-3 was launched in late 2007 because the E-3 is not a small camera.

The thing is, the E-3 wasn't intended to be small and light. It was intended to be a professional camera and the cues are everywhere, in features that you'd normally only find on its Nikon D3 or Canon EOS-1D Mark III contemporaries.

The body was magnesium alloy, rugged and weather sealed. Rather than a mode dial, you cycle through your PASM by holding a button and spinning a control wheel. The battery and memory card doors are secured by positive latches. There's a built-in mechanical shutter to cut off light from the eyepiece for long exposure low-light photography. About the only distinctively "pro" feature it lacked was the built-in vertical grip. Also, thanks to the smaller 10MP Live MOS Four Thirds sensor, it lacked the $4-5,000 price tag of its APS-H and Full Frame competitors, boasting an MSRP of only $1,699 at launch.

It had an articulated 2.5" LCD screen, unlike the competition because, also unlike the competition it could shoot in live view. It sported Olympus's IS in-body image stabilization, a maximum shutter speed of 1/8000th, and could shoot in burst mode at 5 frames per second.

Alas, despite the fact that equivalent lenses were much smaller than its larger-sensored competition, the idea of a pro Four Thirds DSLR just never really caught on.

A shame, because Zuiko glass is great and this thing takes nice pictures...

Maxxum Overdrive: The Sony a700

When Sony acquired Konica Minolta's camera business in 2006, the successor for the Maxxum 7D was already on the drawing board. It wound up being the second Sony-branded DSLR, since the Maxxum 5D successor had already been ready to launch and was simply re-badged as a Sony.

Whereas Konica Minolta had marketed their high-tech autofocus SLRs as "Maxxum" in the USA, "Dynax" in Europe, and "𝛼" (Alpha) in the home market, Sony went with the 𝛼 nomenclature everywhere. The Maxxum 5D replacement became the 𝛼100, while the new high-end camera was marketed as the 𝛼700. (Because I am too lazy to set up a macro, I'm just going to use a lower-case Latin "a" rather than the Greek "𝛼" from here on out.)

Unlike the earlier a100, which used an APS-C sized 10MP CCD sensor, the a700 sported an all-new 12MP Sony Exmor CMOS sensor backed by the latest version of Sony's Bionz image processor. 

Sony had a lot of experience in cameras already, both via their own popular Mavica and Cyber-shot lines of digital point-and-shoots, as well as being a major supplier of sensor chips to other makers. Additionally, they acquired a raft of tech from Konica Minolta.

The sensor featured Minolta's Anti-Shake in-body image stabilization, renamed "Super Steady-Shot" by Sony. It also inherited Minolta's Eye Start, which put a couple sensors under the eyepiece that would wake the camera and start focusing (depending on the setting) when raised to the photographer's eye. The a700 added a sensor in the front of the grip to ensure that the Eye Start sensors wouldn't mistake a tee shirt for a face when the camera was hanging on a strap.

The mode dial had the usual full-auto green rectangle, typical PASM settings, the user-configurable MR (for "Memory Recall"), and then the easy-mode Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Sports, etc. for novices.

Said novices would need to be fairly well-heeled, as the a700 sported an MSRP of $1400 (almost $2200 in current dollars), but gave you a bright pentaprism viewfinder and magnesium front and top body panels for your money.

Oddly, for such a gizmo-laden camera in this price range, there was no LCD status display up top. Instead, when powering up, the 3.0" rear LCD screen would display all the camera's current settings.

The rear panel was high-impact plastic and featured a 3" TFT display, as well as a joystick for moving sensor points and navigating menus and a sliding switch for enabling or defeating the Super Steady Shot picture.

Currently used bodies are running as low as under a c-note and the lenses can be had for a song, as the Alpha mount is essentially orphaned with Sony having discontinued their DSLR offerings.

It gives splendid results for a digital body nearing two decades old.

Down the K-hole: Pentax K20D

The K20D was Pentax's second generation of semi-pro DSLR, replacing the K10D in January of 2008.

While its $1,300 MSRP put it head to head with Canon's EOS 40D, the price leader in the category, its Samsung-sourced 14.6 megapixel CMOS sensor offered almost half again the resolution, making it the highest-resolution APS-C camera on the market at the time (tied, of course, with its Samsung-badged clone, the GX-20.)

It was Pentax's top-of-the-line DSLR, but the line in question only consisted of the K20D and the cheaper, lower-resolution K200D.

The mode dial has the usual full-auto (green rectangle) and PASM modes, along with a couple unique-to-Pentax settings. The "TAv" position is "Shutter and Aperture Priority", where the user operates the front and rear dials to manually select the shutter speed and aperture size and the camera automatically adjusts the ISO to try and get the best exposure. "Sv" is "Sensitivity Priority" and functions like Program mode except the rear dial is used to set ISO on the fly, which is useful when operating in an environment where lighting conditions might vary wildly.

It's a physically small camera in the category; noticeably smaller than the Canon, Nikon, and Olympus entries and even slightly svelter than the Sony a700.

It's missing some typical buttons, such as ISO, instead using a combination of the "Fn" button and on-screen menus to select these settings.

The battery and memory card doors are securely latched and the whole camera feels quite rugged. With its 14.6MP sensor and an ISO range from 100 to 3200 (expandable to 6400), the K20D still holds up quite well today and nice used ones can be found for well under two hundo.

This is the first Pentax DSLR I've spent any real time with, and I can see why Pentax fans are so loyal. It's a solid, easy to use camera that's nice and compact.

Semi-Tough: Canon EOS 40D

Of the high-end “prosumer” DSLR bodies that hit the market during 2007-2008, the Canon EOS 40D had the most aggressive pricing…by a whole dollar.

When it was released in late August of '07, Canon had yet to slice the DSLR market as finely as they did in later years. There were the 1D and 5D professional cameras, but lower on the totem pole there was only the plastic-bodied entry-level EOS Rebel XTi, and the 40D, successor to the earlier 30D.

This meant that the $1,299 Canon EOS 40D had to cater to every buyer from well-heeled novices who were too cool for a Rebel to advanced amateurs and professionals who couldn't justify the $3,000+ tariff demanded for the full-frame 5D.

This made for a mode dial that was a little... crowded.

You had your "Green Rectangle" setting, which turned the camera into a fully-automated giant point-'n'-shoot. For the advanced amateur or pro, there was your regular array of "PASM" modes (as well as "A-DEP", which adjusted the aperture to ensure that all subjects covered by the active focusing points were inside the depth of field), and the user-programmable C1-through-C3 custom settings. Finally, for beginners there was the selection of Sports, Portrait, Landscape, et cetera modes. All in all, this sums up to fifteen possible settings on the mode dial. Yikes!

The LCD panel on top gave you pretty much all the setting info you needed to drive the camera and could be backlit orange for easy reading in dim lighting.

The 40D was a pretty iterative update of the earlier 30D. On the back, the LCD was now a larger 3" screen, up from its predecessor's 2.5" unit, necessitating the relocation of of the buttons from a vertical column to the left of the screen to a horizontal row under it.

Under the hood, the APS-C sized CMOS sensor went from 8.2 to 10.1 megapixels and the 40D got Canon's new DIGIC III image processor, the second camera after the 1D to do so.

Despite being well-received and earning the "Highly Recommended" rating from DPReview, the 40D was one of the shortest-lived prosumer Canons, getting replaced after only a year by the 15MP EOS 50D.

Nowadays you can pick up used 40D bodies for a c-note or less, but they still work great.

Badge Engineering

Leica's first attempt at entering the consumer digital market happened in 1998 with the Digilux, a 1.5MP camera that was a re-badged Fuji.

In late 1999 it was replaced with the Digilux Zoom, a similarly reskinned Fujifilm MX-1700 (also known as the Fujifilm FinePix 1700 in the U.S. market.)

The Digilux Zoom boasted a Fujinon 6.6-19.8mm f/3.2-5.0 zoom lens, which combined with the crop factor of the 1/2.3" CCD sensor to give an equivalent focal length range of 38-114mm on a 35mm camera, which is a useful all-in-one zoom length.

While the body was a solid-feeling construct of aluminum and magnesium, the control layout was haphazard and the opposite of ergonomic. 

The camera used SmartMedia cards to store images and had no USB ports, so you'll need a SmartMedia-compatible card reader if you want to download images.

I'll play with this thing a bit and write an actual review.

A Tale of Two Nikons, Part One

I was out walkabout yesterday with a pair of Nikons.

One was sleek and modern looking, even slightly futuristic. When it came out in 2011, it was the wave of the future; compact and mirrorless with an electronic shutter and live view. 

The other was big and clunky, a stylistic throwback to Nikon's pro bodies of the late Nineties. While it made a splash on its release in 2008 for being a full-frame Nikon with a number on its price tag lower than the ones usually associated with a decent used car, it was actually an atavistic throwback.  

In 2008 a camera with a flappy mechanical mirror was like a late Cretaceous dinosaur; a magnificently evolved beast with no idea that there was a mirrorless asteroid only a decade away from smashing into the market.

Yet the mirrorless Nikon 1 J1 is a footnote, a failed branch on the Nikon evolutionary tree, while the D700 is a photographic Tyrannosaurus rex: extinct, but a legend.

Inside the body of the J1 is a 10MP CCD sensor by Aptina. It was a 1" sensor, a common size for luxo enthusiast compacts, but Nikon has to make up names, so it's a "CX" format sensor, to match "DX" (which everyone else calls APS-C) and the full-frame FX.

The 1" size is the biggest of the small sensors, in much the same way that Four Thirds is the smallest of the big sensors. It's physically large enough that with a large enough aperture you can actually get some background blur, and you can shoot as high as ISO 400 without horrific amounts of noise.

Hey, look at this Camaro Z28 I photographed with the J1!

The J1 was the cheaper half of a two-camera Nikon 1 ecosystem when it came out, with a more poshly-appointed V1 model above it. They used the same lenses and sensor, though.  

I had the kit lens on the camera for my walk. This is a 10-30mm f/3.5-5.6 VR affair that collapses to a reasonably compact size. With this lens the J1 is pocketable, provided we're talking about the sort of roomy pockets found on coats and jackets, not the trouser sort.

Poking a button on the side of the lens barrel and giving the rubber-coated zoom ring a twist will extend the lens and power up the camera. Now you have a 27-82mm equivalent zoom lens that will focus anywhere from eight inches out to infinity (or the end of the universe, whichever comes first.)

I should point out that when I say that the J1 was the cheaper of the Nikon 1 duo, that doesn't mean it was, you know, inexpensive. The body and lens combo I was holding came as a kit for $650 back in 2011, which is the equivalent of nine hundo today. Even back then you could get a beginner DSLR kit for about that price; Nikon's own D3100 went for $699 with a kit zoom.

I also snapped the Camaro with the D700, which had a 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-G zoom lens parked in front of its twelve megapickle full-frame CMOS sensor... but we'll talk about the D700 and that swoopy little superzoom in the next post.

The Pentax Q-S1: A Review

Pentax iterated its Q-series of tiny small-sensor mirrorless cameras extremely quickly. The original Pentax Q was announced in June of 2011, and a new replacement followed each subsequent year until August 2014's debut of the Q-S1, which wound up being the terminal Q.

Internally, the Q-S1 was functionally identical to the preceding year's Q7, right down to the 12MP 1/1.7" BSI CMOS sensor.

The external controls and software menus were unchanged since the original Q, so you can refer to my review of that camera for a rundown of the buttons.

What was different was the plastic external shell, which had a more "rangefinder-esque" shape, rather than the "mini DSLR" look of the Q10 and Q7.

Alas, this meant that the finger grip disappeared from the front of the body. Not a huge loss, since you can pinch the whole camera comfortably between thumb and forefinger and the body weighs a minuscule 7.16 ounces, but still...

That's my Q-S1 with a full kit of 01 Standard Prime, 02 Standard Zoom, 06 Telephoto Zoom, and the 03 Fisheye. The whole ensemble easily stows in the Think Tank Event Messenger 100, which will normally hold a regular DSLR wearing a travel zoom and maybe two smallish lenses. With the Q system, you could pack a light lunch in there along with the camera and all the lenses.

Indiana World War Memorial, 03 Fisheye lens at ISO 3200

It held the price line from the previous model with a $499 price tag, while still offering forty different color combinations.

The Q-S1 lingered in the Pentax catalog for years without a replacement being announced, so when it was discontinued in 2019, that was pretty much the end of the line for the Tiniest Interchangeable Lens Mirrorless.

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