Oh, not him again!

Aitch53 · 2017-12-01T16:36:28+0000

Yes, I’m back. Again. Probably for a bit longer, this time. Depends. Let me explain. It’s a longish story, so pour yourself a drink and get comfortable... A few months ago, due to a strange combination of events (boredom, the internet, a bet with myself and the smallest possible lottery win), I ended up the owner of a low-mileage N!k*n D80 with a N!kk*r AF-S DX 18-55mm f3.5-5.6G VR kit lens. I’ve censored the names for the more sensitive souls who like to pretend P3nt@x is the only DSLR manufacturer. Oops! Sorry about that, this censorship lark is a tad habit forming! :wink: Anyway, I’ve used it for a couple of months and it’s pretty good for a ten year old, 10MP camera. The nice colour handling was one thing that stood out. Then, by coincidence, I dug out my old Pentax 33LF (see the thread in the Your Photos sub-forum). Even fewer MP (3.5, iirc), but similar colours. Interesting…. So I did some checking. Both use CCD sensors, as opposed to CMOS. Mind you, so does the Olympus C-1 Zoom I got given, but that has only 1.5MP and really low ISO limit, so harder to tell! And the colour handling is apparently also down to the software used to convert the files to JPEG. A bit more checking. The last Pentax DSLR to use such a sensor was the K10D. Start the search! Found one going fairly cheap on the SRS site, with kit lens and a low shutter count. Out with the credit card... Obviously I ordered at the wrong time (Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Techno Tuesday/Whatever Wednesday etc) as it took five days to turn up from SRS. It usually takes just a couple and I had assumed the worst - “one of the part-time staff went to get it from the store-room and accidentally dropped it in the vat of liquid nitrogen we keep there for no obvious reason, and it shattered!”, that class of thing. But it eventually arrived this afternoon and I guess they were just snowed under with orders for the sort of very expensive gear I can’t afford and my order got buried under those for K1s and so on. Oh well, c'est la vie, as we say down the ol' Frog and Trumpet. So how do they compare? First impressions are as follows… Both are ‘semi-pro’, which means both are well made and solid, and things like battery grips are available, assuming you can find them. They also both use re-chargeable batteries and SD cards, which makes life easier, not to mention cheaper. Both have image-stabilisation, just in different places. The D80 is lighter and marginally better balanced, in my opinion. But ergonomics are a personal matter and it is a close-run thing. The K10D is noticably heavier (body at 793g as opposed to 668g, though they both have heavyish kit lenses, which evens things up a bit), which affects the balance a bit less than I expected, but could be relevant if I was carrying it about a lot. Over the next couple of days, I’ll get it set up, get the feel of it and try it out on my usual test subjects, and see how it compares that way – expect some of my more tedious pictures to turn up early next week. 8) All in all, I suspect they will get an equal-ish amount of use – well, the new one is a Pentax and can probably expect a bit more work! One last thought, it strikes me as a shame that it’s so much easier and cheaper to produce big CMOS sensors compared with CCD, I suspect a big-CCD based camera would be quite impressive...

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Mike-P Mike-P

13627 posts
18 years
Hythe,
Hampshire UK

Posted 03/12/2017 - 21:34 Link

IMO the one thing the K10D did better than any camera after was macro. I just can't get the same glossy look since moving on to newer bodies. I have recently been revisiting old K10 files and re-doing them with newer PP.

Robber Fly by Mike.Pursey, on Flickr

My Flickr

Edited by Mike-P: 03/12/2017 - 21:36

RobL RobL

2620 posts
11 years
Warwickshire

Posted 03/12/2017 - 22:29 Link

Mike-P wrote:
IMO the one thing the K10D did better than any camera after was macro. I just can't get the same glossy look since moving on to newer bodies. I have recently been revisiting old K10 files and re-doing them with newer PP.

Robber Fly by Mike.Pursey, on Flickr

I am sure the guy who runs the extreme-macro website uses a K10D - amazing results!