View attachment 4845039Long not very well ordered Sunday morning camera ramble follows. You were warned.
On Friday I’m taking my M10M and M11M Leicas and all my lenses in for CLA and focus adjustment. The rangefinders have become amusing adornments rather than devices for focusing. The rangefinder in the M11 was not that good when I got it. So I’m using the Pentax in anticipation of not having my normal cameras for 3-9 months.
I really haven’t used it that much, except for maybe 2-300 shots with the 70/2.4 in India when I wanted a longer lens than I had for my Leica (75mm was the longest M lens I took). I took maybe 150 shots yesterday during a walk up the beach.
I’m still struggling with the Pentax menus. Every time I need to change a setting I need to check the manual. Again. I have the manual on my phone and on my iPad. There are 4 primary menus, with 8 secondary settings, and then a varying number under that. The camera also has 19 external buttons and 5 control dials. I do appreciate very much that the main Mode dial is lockable.
The autofocus is quite good - but it’s nowhere (nowhere!) near a Sony A1, Nikon Z9 or Canon A3. Some of my shots taken using autofocus are focused on the wrong thing. Usual 1990s af problem. Sometimes the confirmation square in the viewfinder can be hard to see.
When I can get it to be on the right setting and focus on the correct thing, the output is great. It’s quite different to a Leica. The native output is lower contrast and has more open shadows. For me this means less post-processing work. The highlight weighted metering works better than the M11 implementation of this feature. The lower pixel count and greater relative use of each pixel equates to kore ‘enlargement’. These factors all mean that the output looks more like 35mm film. The response to filtration is similar to the Leicas - more is less so you’ll need orange filters to get the same tonal response as you’d have got from medium yellow on film. Battery life is tremendous - I get 5-600+ shots per battery. Spare batteries are less than half the price of Leica batteries. You can also charge the batteries in-camera with USB-C.
Image Sync works better - faster, more certain connection and more reliable (less dropouts) than Leica Fotos.
The camera is extremely well integrated with the sensor, better than any Leica including the M11M. High ISO is fantastic, and yes, no banding of note, even up to ISO 100,000. The banding at high ISOs and unpredictable poor responsiveness of the 246 nearly made me quit photography, although mine seemed to be a particularly bad sample for both.
The Pentax is very nice, but an SLR is an SLR. I am reminded that seeing the world through a tunnel is not ideal for me. But as SLR viewfinders go, it is very good. Bright and clear and the view is large enough, unlike most APS-C SLR viewfinders.
The output is great. In many situations, the lower contrast Pentax lenses compared to Leica lenses work extremely well, like having a rigid Summicron on a Monochrom but not having to worry about value, spontaneous haze, optical cement failure, flare and other optical issues that come with older lenses. The coating on the HD Pentax lenses designed for APS-C sensors and their flare resistance is up there with Zeiss, and generally a bit better than Leica, in my experience. But focus shift is a problem, so a lot of the time stopping down even the slower lenses can be necessary. The 35/2.8 macro is amazing, and has no bad habits. I mostly use a 50mm on my Leicas, so it is a great natural fit for the Pentax, although I do notice that the 35mm seems a tiny bit longer on the APS-C Pentax sensor than a 50mm does on a Leica. I might be imagining that.
I can find nothing to strongly dissuade someone from a Pentax K-3 iii Monochrome if they want a digital camera with a monochrome sensor. In many ways it is better integrated and more usable than any Leica Monochrom, the only thing you give up is access to really cutting edge super high resolving glass, and well, the cachet of carrying a Leica and the pricetag that goes with that.
You can buy a K-3 iii Monochrome and HD 15, 21, 35 and 70mm lenses for less than the new price of a Summicron. Unless you are loaded, or know you’re going to love B&W digital photography and do a lot of it, or you can tax deduct the cameras for work, that’s a fairly powerful argument.
View attachment 4845040
Long not very well ordered Sunday morning camera ramble follows. You were warned.
