Random Thoughts about the K-1
After owning the K-1 for a bit now and especially in contrast to the Canon 5d I just got. I have some revised thoughts about the camera:
I find that the K-1 is clunky and doesn't feel good to shoot. The sensor is beautiful and I love the images that come out of it, but the process involved in taking those photos I love a lot less. I find that the K-1 feels the best on a tripod, many of the issues I have with the button layout and the operation of the camera are mildly alleviated when not holding the camera up to my eye.
First of all the green button is where my hands assume the AF button should be and I am CONSTANTLY messing up my exposure on accident. Initially I really liked the 'menu dial', for lack of a better word, on top of the camera, but despite this inclusion I never actually use it to adjust anything except ISO and I find due to the placement of the dial I can't really do it with my eye to the viewfinder, I really wish that the camera had a dedicated ISO button. Another thing I have grown to dislike is that despite all the buttons on the camera I find myself constantly going into the menus. In particular to check if the pixel-shift featured in enabled or not as it does not have an indicator through the OVF, it is only present in the information screen and when using live view.
An odd problem I have is that the camera and I seem to wildly disagree what properly exposed means. I've never had this issue with another camera before and the K-1 seems to overexpose nearly every shot to the point I just leave it on a -2 exposure compensation. I'm not sure if mine is not calibrated correctly or what, but I find it frustrating and leading to a lot more work in post.
I have a few issues related to specifically shooting the K-1 at night:
First, the lack of a highlight-weighted metering mode makes it difficult to get proper exposure without checking every shot, setting it to spot would be a solution, but there is no illumination of the elements, so I cannot see where the inner circle and I have to hunt for the lowest number and lock the exposure there, another issue with the lack of element illumination is that I cannot focus and recompose, but I cannot see the center AF point, maybe there is a option in the custom menu settings, but I have not found it. So the OVF is pretty difficult to use at night. While the live view mode is okay, the auto-focus performance drops significantly and fails more often than not in the dark, which makes sense given that it's contrast detect, meaning I must use focus peaking and punch in to confirm focus and in comparison to other modern cameras I am much less confident in the manual focus. The concequence of those factors combined with the weight of the camera means it is extremely difficult to hand hold at night/low light. Another issue is the lack of illuminated buttons. The camera has a light behind the (very nice) tilting screen, but it doesn't really illuminate anything and I often find myself pulling out my phone to find the button I am looking for or just changing the setting in the menus.
Overall I find I really like the images when I take the camera out and use it, but the process of using the camera means I am rarely reaching for it when I want to go out. I do plan on keeping it in the near future though. I have been extremely happy with it as a film scanning camera. I believe it is probably one of the best cameras for film scanning out there with it's moderately high resolution, the Bayer-canceling pixel-shift, and it's color negative film profile, it produces high quality results with a pretty painless workflow (except the lack of tethering). Another benefit is that it shares a lens mount with my Pentax MZ-S, which is a film camera I quite like for street or more discrete shooting.
I am however, really enjoying the K-01 and I plan to do a write up on that after I get out with it a few more times as I think it's a very interesting and actually underrated camera.
