Pentax K-x

Buttons & Dials

The K-x provides direct access buttons for the most frequently used shooting adjustments — ISO, white balance, drive mode and flash control — and the comprehensive quick menu (available by pressing the Info button) displays nearly all the settings on a single screen. The layout will look familiar to anyone who’s checked out the Pentax K2000, which is nearly identical. To accommodate Live View access (the K2000 lacks this feature), Pentax added a dedicated button in place of the delete button. The delete function now shares the flash pop-up button, which works out fine.

Custom Image Presets

The Pentax K-x provides an extraordinary range of customizable image control settings while shooting, both as custom image presets and filter effects. The missing link here is the option to store the tweaked controls as user-defined custom settings. You can set the camera to retain your changes when restarting the camera, but that’s not as convenient as having separate slots for your customized variations.

The following sample shots are accompanied by the verbatim Pentax descriptions of each preset.

Each of these custom image settings can be fine-tuned in numerous and significant ways, including saturation, hue, contrast, sharpness, and brightness (“High Key / Low Key”), offering an impressive freedom of expression to both sophisticated shooters and those who just want to play around with cool effects.

As with the white balance adjustment system, the custom image settings can be previewed interactively on-screen while you fiddle with the sliders, making this a much more practical process.

Digital Filters

The K-x offers a variety of digital filters, each with a range of settings to tailor the effects. Pentax doesn’t include Cross Processing in the same menu section as the other filters, but logically it feeds the same desire for unusual effects. Examples of each of these filter effects are provided below.

You can also create your own custom filter effect if you like. Adjustable parameters include Color Intensity (Off, +1, +2, +3); Color (Red, Magenta, Cyan, Blue, Green, Yellow); High Contrast (Off, +1, +2, +3, +4, +5), Soft Focus (Off, +1, +2, +3), Tone Break (Off, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow); Shading Level (-3 to +3); Shading Type (6 types), Distortion Type (3 types), Distortion Level (Off, Weak, Medium, Strong) and Invert Color (Off/On).

There’s a basic multiple exposure option, which allows you to take between 2 and 9 shots sequentially and have them composited in camera, with the exposure automatically adjusted if you choose. You have some control over the way images line up — the shots you’ve taken so far are reviewed on the LCD, and you can discard part of the sequence and continue shooting — but without a live preview, there’s a lot of guesswork involved.

Picture Effect Samples

Custom Image Presets - Bright Custom Image Presets - Natural Custom Image Presets - Portrait Custom Image Presets - Landscape Custom Image Presets - Vibrant Custom Image Presets - Muted Custom Image Presets - Monochrome Filter Effects - Toy Camera Filter Effects - High Contrast Filter Effects - Soft Filter Effects - Star Burst Filter Effects - Retro Filter Effects - Extract Color Filter Effects - Fish-eye Filter Effects - Cross Processing More...

In-Camera Editing

The K-x provides plenty of editing options, most of them genuinely useful. You can rotate photos, resize them, crop (3:2, 4:3, 16:9 and 1:1 aspect ratios are available) and develop RAW files, applying any of the available camera settings and effects. If you’re feeling playful, there are 15 digital filters, as shown below. Seven of these (toy camera, high contrast, soft, star burst, retro, extract color and fish-eye) are also available as effects applied directly while shooting. Since you’re stuck without an undistorted original when taking a photo using one of the digital filters, using them during editing seems a lot more sensible.

If all those choices aren’t enough for you, you can also create your own custom filter effect. Parameters include High Contrast (Off, +1 to +5), Soft Focus (Off, +1 to +3), Tone Break (Off, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow), Shading Type (6 types), Shading Level (-3 to +3), Distortion Type (3 types), Distortion level (Off, Weak, Medium or Strong) and Invert Color (off or On).

The Index Print capability can be used to create straightforward contact sheet-style compilations of multiple images, but a multitude of options lets you create interesting collages as well. There are six available image layouts, from ordinary rectangles to angled and overlapped designs, and even a circular pattern with different sizes scattered around the page. Each page can have 12, 24 or 36 photos. with the background set to white or black. Finally, you can choose to include all images, only those in a particular folder, or choose one photo at a time. When you have everything the way you like it, your index print can be saved as a 6-megapixel file.

When viewing movies, it’s possible to capture a single frame by pausing the playback, pressing the INFO button and confirming your intention.

Menu

As with most SLRs today, the K-x offers both a traditional full menu system and a quick menu (which Pentax calls the control panel) providing ready access to the most frequently changed shooting settings. The control panel is accessed by pressing the INFO button in shooting mode, which toggles between the LCD info display, the control panel and turning the LCD off entirely.

To change settings in the control panel, you move the cursor to the relevant category using the four-way controller, At that point you can turn the control dial to cycle through settings, or press OK and bring up a menu displaying all the available options. The settings with dedicated buttons on the camera body aren’t included in the control panel.

The main menu system is broken into four sections: record, playback, setup and custom. All but the playback section have multiple screens, but turning the e-dial makes them easy to navigate — unlike some menu systems, you don’t have to cursor up to the top of a list to move to the next screen of options. We also like the fact that all of your choices are visible on screen at once, without having to scroll down to the bottom of a column to reveal hidden options below.

The white-on-gray text is perfectly legible. And while the quick menu uses icons to fit as many options as possible in a confined space, the main menu system writes out each option clearly. Some commands are placed in categories we found unintuitive; noise reduction choices are found in the custom menu rather than record, while the programmable green button functions are assigned via the record menu. It didn’t take us long to get used to the few oddities, though.

In a feature we’ve applauded in Pentax point-and-shoots, the K-x lets you easily choose which camera settings will be retained and which will be reset when you turn the camera off and turn it back on. There’s a checkbox listing in the fourth Record Mode menu that includes settings for flash mode, drive mode, white balance, ISO, EV and flash compensation, cross processing, digital filter, HDR capture, shooting info display, playback info display and file numbering.

The quick menu puts 15 key settings at your fingertips.

Instruction Manual

The 320-page Operating Manual generally does a good job of explaining the camera’s broad and deep feature set. The writing is clear, and the illustrations, charts and diagrams well designed. Pentax also deserves praised for providing a detailed index that’s genuinely useful, plus a glossary that explains concepts like RAW format, color temperature and histograms. There’s an unfortunately intimidating information dump at the very beginning of the manual, before you get to the Getting Started section, and unlike the Pentax K2000, there’s no separate software user manual, leaving you to learn a complex program using the software help system. We found only one factual error: the procedure described in the section on Readjusting Images Shot in JPEG Format doesn’t work, and it took quite some time with tech support (via live online chat) to sort it out. Overall, though, this is a solid effort. To see for yourself, download a copy in PDF format from the Pentax web site here.