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Manual Control Options
The Pentax K10D offers full manual control for aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and focus, plus customization options for both the interface and image rendering.
Focus
Auto Focus
The Pentax K10D has 11 autofocus sensors. Nine are set up in a 3 x 3 matrix across the middle of the frame, and the other 2 are at each side. The 9 sensors in the middle are cross-type sensors, which are sensitive to either horizontal or vertical detail. In our testing of other cameras, cross-type sensors outperform unidirectional ones. The K10D's 11 sensors are set up much like the sensors in Nikon's CAM 2000 system, present in that company's top-of-the-line D2X and D2Hs.
In casual testing at the Photokina booth, the K10D focused quickly and accurately. We could not test low light performance, and will have more observations in our full review.
Users can manually set the sensor site, let the K10D choose, or lock on the center site. Single and continuous autofocus are available as well.
Manual Focus
The Pentax K10D's autofocus can be shut off for manual focus. Pentax's new lenses generally have narrow focusing rings, but their action is smooth. The focusing screen is bright and contrasty, and the lenses we tried snapped into focus easily. This should be particularly important to users who hope to shoot with old, manual focus K-mount lenses. The K10D confirms focus in manual mode.
Exposure
The Pentax K10D offers full manual exposure, for the user to set aperture, shutter, and ISO. It adds to that several semi-manual modes: program sets both aperture and shutter, but allows a program shift, aperture priority, which adjust the shutter to accommodate the user's chosen aperture, shutter priority, which sets the aperture to accommodate the shutter speed that the user set. Two unusual modes involve ISO. One allows the user to vary the ISO, while the camera keeps up with both aperture and shutter, and inversely, another mode varies ISO to match the user's chosen aperture and shutter.
The exposure compensation offers settings from 2 EV above to 2 below the meter reading, in 1/3 EV steps. The bracketing function allows brackets of 3 or 5 shots, in increments from 1/3 to 2 EV.
Metering
The K10D offers spot, center-weighted averaging and evaluative metering. The evaluative system reads 16 segments across the frame, and evaluates them to settle on an exposure. Evaluative modes are programmed to handle back-lighting and other challenging lighting, but we have found their results mixed in other cameras. We'll have more to say in a full review of the K10D.
The K10D allows the user to link the spot meter to the active autofocus site – we've found this a very useful feature in other cameras, and look forward to evaluating the K10D implementation.
White Balance
The Pentax K10D has a full range of auto white balance, presets, manual settings, Kelvin settings, and fine-tuning. The presets are: sun, shade, cloudy, tungsten, flash, and three flavors of fluorescent.
The K10D has a sort of live preview for white balance. The user can pull up the white balance menu, throw the depth of field switch, and get a shot to appear on the LCD. The shot is not saved to memory, but as the user scrolls through white balance options, the screen image shows them. White balance can also be bracketed and fine-tuned.
ISO
The Pentax K10D's ISO range is 100 to 1600, in full, 1/2 or 1/3 EV steps. It's easy to set while shooting. Two exposure modes incorporate ISO – one sets ISO to match the user's aperture and shutter speed, the other sets aperture and shutter speed to match the user's chosen ISO.
When the user sets ISO to auto, they can set the available range to anything they want -- 100-1600, 100-400, 640-1250 – any contiguous segment of the range.
Shutter Speed
The Pentax K10D has shutter speeds from 1/4000 to 30 seconds, a range that remains constant in all shooting modes. The front dial accesses shutter speed in manual modes. Flash sync maxes out at 1/180, a limitation some users may chafe at – it makes daylight fill flash kind of tough.
Aperture
The rear dial on the K10D controls aperture. This is as good a point as any to plug the upgraded kit lens, the 16-45mm f/4. Though it's not exactly a speed demon itself, the f/4 lens is more useful for indoor available light than the 18-55mm, which drops to a Stygian f/5.6.
The K10D sets aperture in 1/2 or 1/3 stop increments. It's also possible to use old manual lenses on the K10D by operating their aperture rings. We'll know more about that when we write a full review.
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