Gadgetory

this is the Pentax ko1 the company somewhat enigmatic mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera it has a distinctive aesthetic that I think most people will either love or hate and as a camera it inspires some ambivalence as well however you feel about its looks the design works overall and has a few what's called quarks it's big there's no getting around that since it needs to have a long flange focus distance in order to work what standard came out lenses and it's surprisingly heavy given all the empty space between the lens and the sensor also given the size the grip could stand to be a little deeper but it's covered with a ridge - rubberized material that helps and the rest of the controls are big and mostly easy to identify an access despite its modernist design the Kerr one actually has a pretty typical control layout the real problem is this floppy rubber cover it's very difficult clothes it requires two hands to do it to compensate Pentax added a separate plastic cover through the sdcard slot that said at least the card slot is on the side of the camera instead of inside the battery compartment a few of the ko ins features stand out in addition to an intervalometer mode the camera also has an interval movie mode which does the same thing but can shoot for up to 99 hours and automatically saves the final file is an avi movie the handful of shooting special effects are nothing special but you can adjust a variety of parameters for each and it also offers a three shot automatic HDR mode with a range of up to three stops but the KO one has possibly the best mid-range noise profile I've seen in a camera under $1000 the Sony sensor produces extremely fine grained noise and Pentax is uncommonly intelligent JPEG processing results in generally clean images as high as ISO 800 and extremely usable ones through ISO 3200 by other measures the photo quality rates is excellent for its class as well though the default color setting pushes the saturation and contrast until blues and purples shifts are really with the natural custom image preset the colors look neutral and accurate with no loss of saturation we're even flat looking contrast video quality's mixed bad though on one hand it's bright saturated and sharp and good light but there's also quite a bit of rolling shutter and some haloing on edges low-light video is also soft and noisy the 40 millimeter kit lens is quite sharp and the photos come out sharp without looking over processed and without Distortion but it's unsuited to autofocus during video it operates noisily and I found the AF completely inconsistent and unreliable however the manual focus ring works very well for video it's servo electronics so it operates quietly and smoothly but the autofocus system was generally disappointing along with the shooting performance it's the slowest camera in its class the kit lens is especially infuriating it's a prime yet it hunts for focus as if it's a zoom after every shot it resets so when you're taking multiple shots of a stationary subject it iteratively refocuses every time the more I use cameras like this the more I wish that at least the expensive ones had an articulated LCD this model which is relatively large should also at least have the option of an EVF the LCD is big and bright but really difficult to use in bright sunlight the only saving grace is the cameras peaking feature it's a camcorder carryover that highlights edges during focusing which we're seeing a lot more frequently these days on cameras and that's the only thing that makes it possible to ascertain if the scene is framed correctly and in focus when shooting outdoors and off angle if you've got a stable of Pentax lenses especially good ones that can properly resolve to the sensor and you feel like doing some creative shooting especially with manual focus then the Kon is a great choice but if you're looking for an all-purpose ILC under $1000 you may get frustrated with the KO and slow performance in large quirky design and it's probably worth trading off a little on the photo quality for a better all-around camera and likely a less expensive one I'm Laurie Brennan and this is the Pentax ko one