The Humans Are Dead

I finally decided on and bought a new camera. I’ve been looking at both the Nikon D50 and the Pentax *istD L trying to decide what to get. I had a Pentax K1000 back in Uni with a macro/wide lens that I loved, but somebody walked away with it. I haven’t done any serious photography since I lost that camera. I few years ago I received a Nikon EM with a couple nice lenses as a gift, but unlike when I was in school, I no longer have easy access to a dark room. So I’ve never even used the Nikon, but of course there is the possibility that the lenses I have would work with the digital Nikon body.

The decision was made when I went out to Circuit City this weekend to check both cameras out in person. Handling both cameras I liked the feel of the Pentax much better. The hand grip on the Pentax has a kind of hollowed out area where your fingers grip the camera which I thought made for a more comfortable and solid feeling grip of the camera. The Pentax is a bit smaller and a lot lighter than the D50 even tho it features a bigger 2.5″ screen.

Now I already think I’m pretty biased towards the Pentax anyway, but the feel of the camera reinforced it. Then I looked at the price. The Pentax *istD L is on sale this week and offers a $100 rebate, bringing the price of the camera to around $450!! I went home to check prices on the web to see if by chance they had dropped elsewhere. I didn’t find any other retailers offering the rebate, so I went back to Circuit City yesterday and bought it and a high speed 1GB SD memory card that was also on sale.

I’ve only had time to mess around with it a little bit, but I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I headed out to the back yard to take a few shots and they turned out very nice.

Here are a few of the shots. The only post-processing on these is crop and resize. The color, saturation and sharpness are unaltered and straight from the camera. Click the photos for enlargements.

Here is a full size (just cropped not resized) detail of the above photo

I think this next one turned out exceptionally well. Depth of field control you just can’t get from most point and shoots and being digital you can quickly review the shot to perfect the composition. With an old SLR you never knew what you had until you were back in the darkroom at which point it was to late to take another shot.

And of course, no tour of my back yard would be complete without a shot of my 1950 Caddy!

The Nikon D50 has a lot of dedicated fans out there. Who knows it may be a marginally better camera. But the Pentax has a great feel to it, which I think is very important in a camera. The camera has solid features and a good kit lens (18-55mm BTW) and I’m definitely happy with the photos it takes so far. So, I think I made the right choice for my first dSLR. Most importantly, I now have a way to produce high quality custom photography for client websites as needed!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.