Pentax K-50

The Pentax K-30 was our favorite SLR of 2012. Its giant optical finder, twin command dials, weather-sealed body and 6fps burst mode ar options that Canon and Nikon charge significantly over £600 for. Our solely serious reservation was that its angular, flashy style wasn't straightforward on the attention. we do not expect a camera to be a fashion item however it's nice to be able to check up on your new purchase and suppose happy thoughts. With the K-30, we tend to had to recollect that it's what is on the within that counts.

VIVID colors

The new Pentax K-50 is actually constant camera because the K-30 however with a additional typical look. The finder hump is additional rounded and varied alternative edges are ironed off. there is still space for a few strangeness, though, with a alternative of one hundred twenty color variations (20 choices for the body, increased by six for the grip). These are not attachable extras, you decide your favorite colors (based on say a sporting team) once ordering the camera. Most of those combos might moderately be delineated  as ugly – pink and inexperienced is especially surprising – however if that is what floats your boat, then we're all for it.

The kit lens is new, with a plastic instead of metal mount, however it's optically clone of the K-30's kit lens and retains constant level of weather protection. Elsewhere, little or no has modified compared to the K-30. As before, the star of the show is that the finder, with its 0.92x magnification and one hundred per cent field of read. that is considerably larger than the viewfinders on the Canon Greek deity 700D (0.85x, 95%) and Nikon D5200 (0.78x, 95%), and it makes an enormous distinction not only for adjusting manual focus however conjointly merely for composing shots. a lot of data is visible within the finder window, too, as well as exposure mode, manual focus, raw settings associated an electronic horizon.

The controls ar far and away the simplest offered at this worth. the twin command dials provide direct access to the shutter speed and aperture, and there ar a lot of good touches that save time and let users concentrate facet of on taking photos. Spinning a command dial in Program mode switches the camera to aperture- or shutter-priority mode, that we discover much more helpful than the standard program shift perform. choices to customize the car ISO vary ar bestowed next to the manual ISO management, and accessed via the dedicated ISO button – such a lot higher than rival cameras that bury these choices within the menu. Self-timer, burst and exposure bracketing ar sanely sorted along, and enabling  self-timer mechanically disables the sensor-based stabilisation. This makes good sense as you'd ne'er use the self-timer for a hand-held shot. Then there is the flexibility to require JPEGs associated retrospectively save the last shot as a RAW file – good for creating the foremost of an surprising gem.

There's no depth-of-field howeverton but it isn't one thing we tend to incomprehensible . Our solely slight grumble is that the navigation pad shares duties between the tagged functions and moving the optical device purpose. switch between these modes involves holding down the OK button for a few second, however we tend to typically unwittingly accessed a special perform once making an attempt to maneuver the optical device purpose. Then again, each the show|LCD|digital display|alphanumeric display} screen and therefore the finder display build it clear that mode you are in, thus with alittle of follow it should not be onerous to avoid this downside.

PERFORMANCE

It's a quick camera, taking between 2 and 5 photos each second, reckoning on the optical device speed. optical device was usually terribly fast, with 9 of the eleven optical device points being cross-type for exaggerated sensitivity. optical device was moderately responsive in live read mode too, taking but a second except in terribly low light-weight. 2.2 seconds between shots in live read mode is sort of double the speed of the Canon 700D.

Continuous shooting was simply keep of the 6fps quoted speed, delivering five.8fps in our tests. It maintained this speed for thirty eight frames before retardation to a pair of.9fps, even once aberration correction was enabled – constant feature takes a significant toll on the Canon Greek deity 700D's performance. enabling  lens distortion correction slowed it right down, though, to 1.2fps once simply six frames.

The best performance came in raw continuous mode. 5.8fps shooting lasted for eight frames, and so continued  at a still-impressive a pair of.5fps – an enormous improvement on the Canon 700D and Nikon D7100, that depart at 5fps however quickly slowed to around one.5fps.

VIDEO QUALITY

While the K-50 excels for engineering and performance, its options are not as up-to-date because the competition's. the shortage of associate HDMI port looks like a wierd omission in 2013. The 3in, 921,000-dot screen is sharp and bright however it isn't articulated or touch-sensitive. Videos ar recorded at 1080p at a alternative of twenty four, twenty five or 30fps frame rates, however clips ar restricted to around seventeen minutes and optical device is unprocurable whereas recording. Video quality is ok for the odd casual clip, however details looked slightly coarse and low-light clips were hissing.