Happy New Year 2025 to all you awesome people out there!
Thanks for still visiting this space, and I appreciate your patronage here. To kick start the new year, let's play with something not so new - the Pentax Q! It is almost impossible to find a Pentax Q in Malaysia, I am not even sure if it was ever sold here, and I was very lucky to nab one recently in the used market. I brought the Pentax Q out for a shutter therapy session, and I am sharing plenty of fresh images in this blog article. The Pentax Q is super compact, cute, beautiful in design and solidly built, but I must be 100% honest I did not enjoy using it. The experience was very similar to using any compact point and shoot digital cameras back then - poor image quality which was a consequence of using such tiny 1/2.3" image sensor. I personally think this was a missed opportunity for Pentax, if they have chosen a larger sensor for the Pentax Q, say joining the Micro Four Thirds alliance, the landscape of imaging industry would have been very different. Nevertheless, that is the past, and I share more opinion in my latest video here (click).
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Image quality looks fine to me. They probably wouldn't stand up to huge enlargements, but for posting on the web they look good. I have a Lumix with the same size sensor that I carry when my DSLR is too much to carry. It's a lot of fun!
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly a jewel-like camera, but as Robin says, what a missed opportunity. If Pentax had used a 1" sensor and applied the same care, design, and build quality, it could have been a big rival to the Nikon 1 and maybe even M43. Saddling it with a compact P&S sized sensor is a real head scratcher. Even the Pentax Auto 110 had a larger sensor. Seems that Pentax seems to thrive on quirky cameras, but that hasn't gotten them major sales. The deep DOF with no easy way to make it shallower is a real drawback. Robin gets excellent results from his M43 cameras and even a Nikon 1, so now that he's indulged his curiosity, this camera will probably go into the display cabinet, where it probably belongs. :-)
ReplyDeleteI think of it as a rather unique curio than a functional camera
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