Sony A390 or Pentax K-x?

M

mutamist

Suspended / Banned
Messages
29
Name
Steve
Edit My Images
Yes
've been looking at the Pentax K-x which gets an Essential Rating on Photography Blog which you don't see often. Only negative I can see is that it also doesn't have an autofocus indicator in the viewfinder - how important is this?

I've also been looking at the upcoming Sony A390, though it's hard to gauge how good it is without seeing a hands on review. I owned an A200 in the past and got on with that.

They both are available for around the £400-410 mark for single lens (18-55mm) kit. How does the Pentax lens availability compare to that for the Sony? The Pentax does seem to tick a lot of boxes and seems to get glowing reports from all over.

Any opinions on which is or could be better? I'm a beginner.
 
You've slightly misunderstood the autofocus indicator I think. It does not superimpose a red dot on the field of view that says what part of the image the camera has focussed on. Other Pentax models do this. However, there is an autofocus confirm signal in the viefinder to let you know when it has acheived autofocus.

It's hard to say how big a deal this will be to you - one of the things about Pentax cameras is their backwards compatibility with old lenses, so you may well find yourself manual focussing and so the indicator won't matter to you! Certainly, I find myself using manual focus regularly just because of the creative possibilities it offers.

Pentax lens availability is good online, you'll get lenses quickly when ordered, but not so hot if you want to go to the local Jessops and play with a lens (I think Jessops have stopped stocking pentax gear altogether now).

The K-x is, by all accounts, a fantastic camera and certainly has one of the best sensors of the consumer level DSLRs out at the moment. The kit lens is also very good. If you can stretch to it, get one of the dual lens kits with the DAL 55-300mm lens - the optical formula of this is the same as the more expensive DA 55-300mm lens which is considered excellent as a consumer telezoom.

I'm afraid I've no experience of the Sony system to help you out there though.
 
As a Pentax user (K20D and K-7) I could easily say that for the money the K-x is the best performing camera in its class at the moment but really it means nothing if the body feels wrong in your hands. Go and have a play with all the makes and then decide if it's right fo you.

As for the lack of visible AF points, for the life of me I cannot understand why Pentax have left those out but as someone who uses centre point 99.9% of the time it wouldn't make any difference to me anyway. I believe they are visible when using liveview though.

You will find this forum is made up of mainly Canon/Nikon users so perhaps it would be worthwhile popping over to Pentax User or Pentaxforums and asking/reading other users opinions :)
 
Thanks for the input, much appreciated. I guess the autofocus foible will be something that as a user you'd get used to over time. At least there's some kind of signal as to when it has focused. I'd imagine if I wanted a particular focus area I'd chose to focus using a focus point rather than just general shooting. Or have I misunderstood it even further and you don't get a focus indicator for when you choose off centre focus points?
 
Type "lack of AF points K-x" into Google and you will get plenty of info about the subject ;)

Pentax lens availability : I have 10mm to 500mm so I will say more than adequate but there are some specialist type lenses (tilt/shift/long fast tele) that are missing from the lineup. Unless you are thinking of spending around 3/4k on a lens in the future I can't see that being much of a problem though.
 
the pentax kx is a good camera, and does get really good reviews. out of all the camera brands pentax has the best for lens compatibility because i think i recall that pentax cameras can accept lenses dated back to the 1950's.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top