A true leader in its price class: K10D sets the bar high

The K10D is a 10.2MP digital SLR from Pentax. It builds upon the successes of Pentax's *ist- series (*ist-D, DS, DS2, DL, and DL2) plus improved features such as shake reduction previously only found in the K100D. The K10D also takes advantage of Pentax's large assortment of current and past lenses. Pentax is well known for its fine lenses, and with the K10D you can use just about any K-mount lens ever made for Pentax SLR's, going back nearly 30 years.

The K10D boasts the following primary features: 10.2 Megapixels. In-camera shake reduction, capabile of cleaning up hand-held camera-shake blur at shutter speeds up to four stops slower than without. Weather and dust proofing. Automatic sensor cleaning. New shooting modes not previously found in SLR's. Wireless flash control. Auto-ISO sensitivity within user-defined ranges. White-balance fine-tuning. Built-in flash with sync speeds up to 1/250th. Compatibility with Pentax's new line of HSM (similar to ultrasonic focus) lenses. In camera RAW development, plus the ability to shoot JPEG, RAW, or RAW+JPEG. A high-speed buffer, capable of shooting continuous 3 frames per second in JPEG mode until the SD card is full (that's impressive) or up to nine continuous RAW shots at 3fps (after that, 1.5fps).

Let's look at a few of the interesting features. First, shake reduction. Nobody is able to hand hold a camera completely still. Photographers know that as a rule of thumb you should never hold a 35mm SLR at shutter speeds slower than one divided by the focal length of the lens. That means a 50mm lens shouldn't be hand-held slower than 1/50th. DSLR's use smaller sensors than film, so there is what's known as a crop factor. This crop factor has some bearing on how slow a shot can be hand-held. You basically need to add 50% to the shutter speed. So if you could hand-hold a shot at 1/50th on a regular SLR, you can hand hold it at 1/75th or faster on a digital SLR with a 1.5x crop factor.

Sounds complicated, but you get used to it fast. Now for the good news. With SR turned on, on the Pentax K10D, you can hand hold that 50mm lens down to about 1/8th of a second, if you're careful, and still achieve good results. Individual shooting styles and needs will dictate just how slow you can hand-hold the shot (as well as focal length of the lens), but you do get at least two (and up to 4) stops better hand-held performance with Pentax's SR turned on. At two stops, that 50mm lens can be hand-held at about 1/15th of a second. Not bad!

One thing worth mentioning: With other brands, the shake reduction is built into specific lenses. While it is possible that this strategy may achieve a higher degree of shake reduction with an individual lens, the Pentax system benefits by providing shake reduction to ALL lenses in your arsenal, even if the lens is 25 years old. You don't have to go out and invest in one or two high priced IS lenses, and mount one of those lenses whenever your shot needs image stabilization. Whatever lens you've got mounted on the camera already will achieve image stabilization through the camera's built-in electro-mechanical shake reduction.

Next feature: Weatherproofing. This is just a peace of mind feature. I never ruined a non-weatherproof camera either. But now I worry less with the Pentax K10D. As an avid hiker and sailer, I have plenty of opportunity to put the camera's durability to the test. The K10D's weather/dust proofing is a nice touch, and something that helped me to lean toward this model.

Next feature: Shooting modes. You have the standard Program mode (actually, it's Hyper Program on the K10D, meaning that you can easily override the program mode's settings by altering the shutter or aperture). Program mode can be set to follow a normal program line, a high speed shutter program line, a depth of field program line, or an MTF program line (where the camera attempts to keep the aperture close to the lens's sweet-spot). And as mentioned already, because it's Hyper-Program, if you shift the aperture, the camera's metering will react by adjusting the shutter speed to compensate. Or vice versa, without ever leaving program mode.

After Program mode, you also have the well known Tv (shutter priority) and Av (aperture priority) modes, as well as Metered Manual (Hyper Manual actually), and Bulb.

But Pentax has added two additional shooting modes: Sv (sensitivity priority), and TAv (shutter & aperture priority). In Sv, you select the ISO and the camera sets the shutter and aperture. In TAv, you set the shutter and aperture, and the camera sets the ISO. These are modes unique to the Pentax K10D, and a lot of people love them. Additionally the camera supports auto-ISO, where the user gets to set what range is acceptable (400-800, for example, locking out anything below 400 or above 800).

Flash: The camera allows you to use its on-board flash, or to use an external flash. Plus, you can use the on-board flash to wirelessly control a dedicated Pentax flash such as the AF360FGZ or AF540FGZ. You can set the camera to auto select flash white balance when the flash it activated, if you wish. ...a nice touch. That's an advantageous feature, and I'll explain why: Imagine you've been shooting without a flash indoors under tungsten light. You've set your camera's white balance to tungsten mode. Now you pop up the flash and use it for one or two shots, forgetting to re-set the white balance. Most cameras would yield unacceptably bluesh-balanced shots. Correction in post processing would be difficult, and full recovery would be impossible. But with this camera you can set it so that when you pop up the flash the white balance changes from whatever your current setting is, to the flash setting. No more botched up balances. This feature can be turned off too, in case you really do want to retain the current balance setting.

And wireless flash opens up a whole world of advanced lighting options. With wireless flash, you can have light coming from several angles, softening the harsh look of head-on direct flash. I use that feature frequently.

Auto image rotation: Take a picture in portrait mode, and it's automatically saved in portrait orientation. Very convenient. There's nothing more boring than scanning through 100 pictures, clicking "rotate" on a third of them so that they'll be oriented correctly. This camera will store proper orientation information in the image's metadata, and your software will pick up on that, displaying it "head's up".

Excellent image quality. I like to shoot RAW, and use Lightroom to manage and process my workflow. For those of you who prefer JPEG's, you won't be disappointed. The camera's jpegs express a depth that you don't see with many of the over-sharpened consumer oriented cameras. There is also a large degree of configurability over the characteristics of the jpegs captured by this camera. The camera has a bright (vivid) mode, and a post-processing-friendly "natural" mode. For each mode you also have seven steps for fine tuning sharpness, saturation, and contrast.

White balance: You've got auto, a bunch of presets, several user-definable, and even the ability to fine tune each preset individually. That's very nice. When you select white balance after taking a shot, the last shot you took is used as the backdrop for the WB menu, so you can see how your change will affect the shot.

Multiple superimposed exposure mode, automatic 3 or 5 step bracketing of both exposure and digital capture settings, digital preview, depth of field preview, extremely convenient controls (two user-programmable E-dials, a USER mode, push-of-a-button bracketing, simple selection of spot, center weight, or matrix metering, etc. ...all easy to use. The AF system also allows for automatic matrix AF, AF with user-selectable zones, or spot AF.

ISO can be set to anywhere between 100 and 1600, in 1, 1/2, or 1/3rd-stop increments. Auto-ISO is easy to use too. And when using manually selected ISO, all you have to do is put your thumb on a button and turn an e-dial to change the ISO. It's simple. There have been some complaints of vertical pattern noise when trying to pull shadow detail out of really underexposed shadows at ISO1600. These issues seem to mostly occur when people expect the impossible; in real-world shooting you don't stumble across this issue, in my experience. But it needs mentioning.

A few more notes: Pentax is on the verge of introducing a series of DA* lenses (DA star). These lenses will feature weatherproofing, very high quality optics, fast maximum apertures, and a new ultrasonic autofocus system, where the AF motor is integrated into the lens. This system is reported to be quieter, faster, and more accurate than the traditional "screw drive" AF. I find the traditional autofocus system to be quick and accurate, but the new system should be even better. Look for the first of these lenses to come out near the end of the summer of 2007, though the release date has been pushed back already a couple of times.

Pentax also offers some very fine quality prosumer lenses labeled as "Limited". These lenses are quite compact, fast, with beautiful optics and build quality. I mention lenses because it is Pentax's reputation for great "glass" that entices many people into the Pentax camp.

This camera is a pleasure to use. I've owned mine for about six months and have taken thousands of shots without a glitch. It's difficult to remember all the things I like about it, but even harder to come up with negatives. Battery life is excellent (SR doesn't affect it), and the camera's form factor, menus, and controls are exactly what you (or I) would hope for. I kept my older *ist-DS as a back-up after buying the K10D, and in six months haven't touched it once. I can't imagine going back.