Gadgetory

as with many of Penn taxes cameras of late you really can't miss the k-50 in a crowd notable design-wise for the ability to configure it in innumerable two-tone color combinations the real appeal of this consumer DSLR is the weather sealed body and broad photography oriented feature set all for a good price it's cheaper brother the K 500 is exactly the same but without the weather sealing and comes only in basic black the body is comfortable to hold even single-handed with gaskets sealing up the potential leak points it lacks an articulated LCD but otherwise is nicely designed with subtleties like the type of double dials you normally find in higher-end models and direct access buttons for almost everything and an interactive control panel for the rest camera has Pentax specific semi manual modes like shutter and aperture priority mode which adjusts ISO sensitivity automatically and sensitivity priority mode which adjusts shutter speed and aperture based on the ISO sensitivity you select plus there are some nice to have options like interval shooting one big drawback however is the camera and kit lens are pretty noisy almost as if the purpose of the camera is to provide camera like sound effects well it's not the speediest model in its price class it sufficiently fast to keep up with most family and vacation needs I was a little disappointed at the photo quality though the default color setting bright completely whacks out the colors and it seems like pen taxes JPEG processing just hasn't kept up with Nikon or Sony it's still sufficiently better than a point-and-shoot at least if you change the defaults so if you're planning to step up you should be ok with it video looks pretty meh though with lots of more a aliasing and even rolling shutter K 50 is a good deal if you need a weather sealed or multi color DSLR but similarly priced competitors look a bit better in comparison for speed and video and photo quality and the K 500 seems to lose out on all counts they're both ok cameras just not the best to DuPont I'm Laurie grinning and this is the Pentax K 50