New Pentax K7 Camera

I recently traded in my Pentax K10D camera body for a new Pentax K7. I kept the same Tamron 18 - 250 mm zoom lens (equivalent to 27 - 375 mm on this body). Despite the camera shop salesman telling me its quality isn't really up to the new camera, I love the huge range from mild wide angle to decent zoom. As I've mentioned before, I'm just not ready to carry around several lenses and switch back and forth. Besides, my main quality issue isn't the lens, its hand-held shots without a tripod!

The first four shots were from a batch taken in the backyard as soon as the battery was charged enough to use. The next four were from a kayaking trip to Redberry Lake the next day. And the last four were from walking to work the following day. They're drawn from a limited number of shots with the new camera, but so far I'm pretty happy with it. It seems to focus faster, expose better, and have better low light capabilities - all things I was looking for. And it's slightly smaller and lighter than the K10D which is a nice bonus.

2009-08 new Pentax K7

The other big new feature is that it can shoot video. It always seemed funny that almost every little point and shoot camera does video, but dSLR's didn't. Now that's changing, with most of the new models supporting video. But it's first generation technology and there are limitations - for example, on the K7 there's no auto-focus while shooting video. But unlike some point-and-shoot camera, you can zoom the lens while shooting.

Although you can shoot 1536 x 1024 video it's hard to find anywhere to post video at this resolution. The example here was stabilized with iMovie (to remove the jitter from my usual hand-holding) and then exported at HD resolution (1280×720).



To see it in HD, click on "Vimeo" to go to the video on their web site, then view full-screen. Depending on your screen resolution it'll probably look better if you turn off scaling.

The content of the video is nothing special, it was mostly just a test. It's too bad there's no easy way to post the full resolution version since it's quite a bit nicer.