On Dec 6, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Tom Cakalic wrote: > THROW BRAND NAME OUT THE WINDOW! > > Stop thinking (like me) that because you've been mostly or 100% > Pentax, that you're confined to a brand. That's not true!
When I got my K100, I had been shooting almost entirely Minolta for nearly 35 years. I had a drawer full of Minolta gear (and still do), and no digital bodies to use the lenses on. I also had a drawer of Nikon mount lenses. I nearly bought the D40, but it turned out that the manual focus lenses wouldn't work well on the D40 body, and the K100 was a much better value. > > Why do you like photography? > > Is it because you like to see things? > > Is it because you like to share things? > > Is that true or not? > > In that case, stop thinking that YOUR current BRAND must be PENTAX. > Your 'investment' in the brand is temporal. > > Regardless of brand, the excellent image you capture and share is by > far the most important thing you will produce! And for most of the photography I do, I doubt there is a camera that will do significantly better, or in a lot of cases nearly as well, as my K-5 (or the K5-II) for anywhere near the price. > > Photography is not about brand name. > > I write this because I believe, really believe, that Pentax is a dead brand. > > Be honest with yourselves. I think Pentax has been, for the last 20 > years, the bargain brand. That's why I joined . > > ,,, 1990.. 2012... > > It's not about brand. Nope, it's not about brand. There used to be a lot of reasons to have all of your bodies and lenses be the same brand. Now that the body is more like the film used to be, you are best matching body and lens combinations to specific tasks, rather than trying to make all of your gear do everything. Face it, a body costs about the same as a good lens, so if there is something where a Nikon, or Canon body/lens combo would work a lot better than Pentax, you can make a good case for buying those rather than two Pentax lenses. If I had the money, I'd be seriously thinking about getting a D600 right about now. If I was buying my first DSLR today, rather than five years ago, I'd probably buy the D600. But, I've never used one, or seen any photos taken by one compared to ones I took with my K-5 in the same light. As to whether Pentax the brand is dead? We'll see about that. It could wither away over the next two years, or they could come out with a full frame equivalent to the K5-IIs, which I suspect in pure image quality would blow anything that costs less than $4,000 right out of the water. In the meantime, the existence of cameras like the D600 hasn't magically caused any of my camera bodies or lenses to stop working. Last night I finally got around to testing an old 135/2.5 for Luiz that he bought off one of our other members for $35. I stopped by a local blues club (which seems to have greatly improved it's stage lighting) and used the 135 for a while with available light, then took a few with a CTO gel on my AF540, powered down all the way, for a touch of fill light. There may be some problems with these pictures, but I doubt that anybody could do much better with a kit that you could get for much less money (though I would have been better off with a smaller cheap dumb strobe for fill rather than the AF540). http://www.fluidr.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157632188947772/ Grumble: fluidr isn't showing exposure data with these photos. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
