After spending some quality time with the Pentax 645D
We were lucking enough to get a fully working Pentax 645D with a 55mm for the day yesterday.
Heres some of our thoughts and the photographers who tested it.
The functionality of the camera is great, the ability to change a number of camera setting externally from the menu is a real plus ie Mirror Up, Bracketing settings , Raw to Jpeg it very much feels like a SLR in this area.
The body while bulky is quite well-balanced and relatively light with the 55mm lens. It is very evident that have gone to a lot trouble to make the camera as robust as possible and as weather proof as possible. Although we really didn’t test out the weather proofing bit. We didn’t think Pentax would like soaked demo camera back , but from what we have read and what you can see on the camera it looks good in this area.
Single battery is handy , which lasted into evening shoots . We are told it’s about 800 shoots. The point was made to us re the battery why do other systems have a need for two battery systems. Put simply other systems can be used in a number of different configurations, meaning the back is separate from the body allowing us to use the back on 4×5 cameras etc so the body needs to be powered independently. This is not the case with the Pentax 645D as it only has one configuration.
DNG how good is that, when ever we get a new camera to test it is always a battle to get the RAW files converted. Not with the Pentax its DNG which meant we could convert the raws on what ever we liked. Now that’s smart thinking Pentax.
The over all image quality was great. The camera and lens performed very well. Great clarity and sharpness ,so the 55mm seemed to do the Camera and sensor justice. We didn’t get to test an older film lens on it so we will reserve our opinion on that front until we can do so. In regards to the size of the files we processed a RAW out to 226.1mb in 16bit or 113mb in 8bit but why would you.
We will get some more thoughts posted , but we must say we had a great time using the camera . And yes we were very impressed. Well done Pentax
