Wedding bokeh?
The metal shutter button is raised and can’t be mistaken for the tiny, recessed power switch nearby. Over on the the left hand side, past the hot shoe, is a button to enter playback mode and a catch to release the tiny built-in flash which springs out on an unexpectedly long hinged cantilever much like a jack-in-a-box.
A pop-up flash by anyone's standards
On the front of the camera, a programmable five-position ‘quick dial’ let’s you choose from a selection of four pre-set camera configurations which you can set up beforehand via the menus.
Key to the design of the Q is its use of interchangeable lenses: Due to the Q’s small image sensor, the specially-designed Q-mount lenses are correspondingly teeny-weeny: The smallest examples being about the size of one of those little round pots of lip-balm. They’re also very, very light. To put this into context, I carried the Q along with four lenses in a single jacket pocket, hardly noticing the weight at all. If you’ve tried that with any other camera system, you’ll appreciate just how much of a difference the Q setup can make.
Indubitably dinky
The review sample came fitted with a non-zooming or ‘prime’ lens with a wide aperture of f1.9. Its focal length of 8.5mm translates to a field of view equivalent to a 47mm lens in 35mm terms, which makes it great for natural-looking people shots and street photography. It’s a great lens to leave on the camera pretty much all the time and yes, it will fit into a jeans pocket albeit in a somewhat embarrassing ‘or are you just pleased to see me’ kind of way.
The aperture opens wide enough to allow some degree of bokeh – as shown in the toy monkey image, but you’ll have to have your subject extremely close to get a strong effect. This is where the aforementioned ‘Blur Control’ mode comes in, allowing the Q to shoot up to three differently-focused images and combine them to create artificially enhanced bokeh.
A useful array of lenses to suit its 5.5x crop factor
Considerably larger is the optional 5-15mm zoom. A 35mm equivalent to 27.5-83mm it covers medium–wide to portrait focal lengths and still opens up to a relatively bright f/2.8 at the wide end of the range. Both of these lenses support autofocus and incorporate mechanical shutters. The 3.2mm diagonal fish eye is, however, without either of these features and must therefore be focused manually while relying on the Q’s electronic shutter.
Next page: Compromising position
COMMENTS
Bokeh?
Can I just pedantically point out the misunderstanding of the term 'bokeh' in the article, as misused by ignorant forum commenters everywhere but, ideally, not in proper reviews themselves.
It's a horrible-looking work, but 'bokeh' refers to the visual *quality* of the out of focus areas - ie. the shape of the artefacts, the smoothness or otherwise of the effect. It's not the fact in itself that a low depth of field has been used to produce these de-focussed areas.
You can't say "The aperture opens wide enough to allow some degree of bokeh" because it's like saying it "allows some degree of nice". You mean it allows a shallow depth of field, or background de-focussing or whatever. You can then go on to discuss the quality of the bokeh if you like :)
Err - Am I the only one
who thinks those sample images look pretty terrible? I wouldn't give you £40 for a camera that captures images like that, never mind £400. Interchangeable lenses is a nice gimmick, but if the body has such a tiny and slow sensor as those shots seem to indicate you might as well just by a pocketful of glass beads and a standard cheap compact.
Thank you for not making me act on my own pedantic urges. I strongly agree with you, good sir.
Good to see.
As a long, long term Pentax user (the lenses for my old ME Super now grace my k-5), I'm loving seeing Pentax come out with such a wide variety of new cameras, and fitting them into the niches they made 30+ years ago (my dad had the Auto110 at my recommendation and still mourns it's passing).
OTOH, it means that I might not have the distinctive name on my camera - Nikons and Canons are now so standard I get asked if Pentax are a new company when I'm being a tourist - a bit of a change from my youth when only grown ups and pros had either, and there were far more Pentax, Minolta, Practika, Ricoh, Zenith, Cosina SLRs on show.
Viewfinder
One of the photos in this review shows a remarkable-looking add-on viewfinder that isn't mentioned at all in the text. Optical viewfinders are of great interest to many people who, like me, feel drawn to these new retro cameras: couldn't you give the reviewer a couple more paras to discuss this (assuming they received the viewfinder)? Or drop the nonsense about the "toy" lenses to make room?
