Decisions decisions

So, we've settled on Pentax, now which one to get.

 

The Km  is a bit underpowered, the bottom end consumer model.

The Kx is nice, The K7 is VERY nice but too darn expensive at $1100+.

Lets look at the previous models, now all of 18 months 'old'

The were the K2000, K200 and K20D in about the same order.  The K20D is the 'Pro-sumer' model and started out life around $1400 body only.  Now they're fetching like$600-700. Hmmm, K7 features for half price.  Sign me the heck up.

Here's the K20, a bit smaller than it's competition.

LOTS of buttons and dials, S. is going to be pleased.
Cool review at http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/PentaxK20D/  who are, frankly the best camera review site out there.
Now to find one. I've bid on like six of them on eBay. They either go for WAY too much (the manufacturer is selling old stock for $800) or I'm not available when the auction closes. Drat.
Found one on Craigslist with a BUNCH of accessories. We'll see how that goes.

Woot!

Found a Pentax DA SMC18-55 Autofocus Zoom on Amazon for $40 brand new. Cool.
It's not the latest 'weather resistant' model, but the lower end Pentax zooms consistently test better than the equivalent models from Canon, Nikon or Sony.

"So not you have a lens and a printer but no camera, Whassup wid dat?"
I hope I'm going to find a viable Pentax. Both the lens and printer were really good deals. Guessing I could sell either for more than I paid. Not plannin'on it though.

The little camera that COULD

Before deciding on getting a dSLR for all the image quality and control it brings to the party, we were looking at advanced point-and-shoot cameras. Ideally one with complete manual controls, a viewfinder so you can see what you're shooting in bright sunlight and RAW (unprocessed/non-JPEG) output capability. Most consumer cameras make a mess of the image during the conversion to JPEG. Everything with those capabilities and at least a half decent lens was $300 and up. Seemed kinda steep for a little pocket camera.

 

Found one of these on eBay for 67 bucks. The next later models were dumbed down to the max and have sensors with serious noise problems above ISO200 (which they compensate for by making the image blurry enough so the noise doesn't show, thus negating the fancy 10-12 megapixel resolution) or crazy zoom ranges on lenses that turn out to be not so sharp - and no manual modes.

This one has almost everything we were looking for including full manual mode *WITH* manual focus and a reasonably sharp 35-150 f2.8 lens. The only thing it's really missing is the RAW mode. Fortunately the Super-Fine JPEG mode isn't too bad. ...and for $67...

Yes the movie mode is crap. We'll get over it.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/Q408budgetgroup/page3.asp

That whole Printer thing

Turns out you have to eventually get the photos OUT of the camera. Dinky web photos are all well and good but you can produce something good enough for that with a $100 point-n-shoot and a free photo editor like Picasa.
Photo printers seem to divide into classes by the maximum print width. 8.5 in, 13 in. 17 in, 24 in. and gynormous. The 24in. and up classes are all above $2000 so they're way out of the budget. The little printers do a really fine job at 4x6 to 8x10 size prints, but that seems a little small, though the 'under $200' is nicely proportional. The operating expenses don't seem to stay small though. Especially when calculated on a per-sq.in. basis.
Point of comparison: The local photo lab does very nice quality prints up to a maximum of 24x96in at basically $10/sq.ft. That would eat up the budget quick.
So, I'm going to focus on the 13in. and 17in. width printers. Canon and HP have some nice ones between $600-800. Epson makes the R1800/R1900 13incher for around $500. They all have pretty small ink tanks though which seems to really impact the operating costs. Still looking.


[Edit] Found a refurb Epson 3800 (17in. 9-ink, 3-level black for nice B&W) for under $1000 and it comes with $450 worth of new ink carts. Puts it right in the same (effective) price range as the R1800/1900 13in. printers but with out the ink-swapping and small ink tanks and iffy B&W prints. Pretty compelling

 

Yeah it's kinda big, but when everything is folded down it's not so bad. Besides I have a nice space for it.

Lotsa choizes

Hmmm the high end of the advanced point-and-shoot/and/or/digital viewfinder camera market sits right around $500. Which is right where the lower-middle end of the dSLR market lives. Seems like every one I look at has something important missing. I really like the Sony dSLR's but the new low-end ones are bizarrely redisigned, uncomfortable and strange. They do have by far the best Live-View (on the display while you're shooting) mode of anybody, and their high end and older model units seem to work well.  By the time you get to a model that has everything I want it's called the A850 and costs $2000 for just the body. Drat. Gonna have to scale back the 'wants.'  The Nikon's and Canon's seem nice but aren't exactly a compelling value, especially since they build  their anti-shake and autofocus capability into their lenses, which makes them considerably more expensive.
One of the key advantages of the Pentax and Sony/Minolta units is that they do a good job of supporting their older lenses. Including anti-shake and most of the automatic modes (though obviously not autofocus, eh?) and especially Pentax has some older glass that's very well thought-of which now shows up on eBay for a tenth of what the current stuff goes for. Off to do more reading. Starting to look like Sony/Minolra or Pentax. We'll see.

Photograferz R US?

I think it was about 1983 when I got fed-up with darkrooms. An insane number of hours in a dank dark smelly room producing things that never seemed to quite match what I'd imagined. I was mostly following Fred's Zone Four Workshop approach. Pretty darn good results without going through the whole A.Adams' Zone System uber detail thingy. Still a massive timesink and with a kid on the way I bundled up the whole thing: Sinks, Trays/baths, A sweet Bessler 67XL with a nice Nikkor, scads of essential gadgets and one of  the Nikon bodies and a lens or two and sold the whole thing for a grand. It was worth more but being able to get rid of all of it at once...
Then a major house fire some years later put paid to everything else. A couple hundred rolls worth of negatives and slides. Melted, smoked, rained-on, all of the above.  Bummer.

S. had quite a Pentax setup. P3 Body and a couple lenses. She had enough brains to stay away from dark rooms though. That setup worked fine between the mid 80's and very late 90's. Then the camera died. After only a few thousand frames. How rude.

Recently a couple things happened, other than really needing a good distraction. First I came across the work of a landscape photographer who creates stitched composites of 20-30 images to generate very impressive large scale panorama images. Another gallery had very cool High Dynamic Range (no, not the cartoon-ish stuff) landscape images. Then I stumbled across http://luminous-landscape.com/ and especially http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/digital_black_and_white.html the NorthLight guy and the state of the art in digital B&W. I gotta do me somma that!

Of course this brings up many questions: Advanced point-n-shoot? One of the new Viewfinder style digital cameras?
( http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong10/ ) or go for the full on dSLR treatment?  I do like that one of the best known 'developing'/editing applications is called Lightroom.
And, how do ya print the darn things anyway?
Each question begats six others...

One thing that has been thought out is the budget. Think I'll try to limit it to what I sold my last setup for, plus inflation. Say roughly $2K