Pentax K100D

The enthusiast level Digital SLR market in India is primarily dominated by Canon's Digital Rebels and Nikon's D series. Though there were quite a few models launched by other manufacturers, the market monopoly in this segment still stood strong with these two brands.

Does the Pentax K100D manage to hold its own against these bigwigs? Let's test this one out and see for ourselves.

Build
Just like most other D-SLRs, the K100D sports a hard plastic body with a rubber grip. The overall body by itself weighs 660g but the four AA batteries and the lens add in an extra few hundred grams to the overall weight, which is still quite acceptable for a D-SLR. The camera body itself is not too bulky at 129 x 93 x 70 mm.

The top of the camera has the standard pop-up flash and a digital display panel that gives you various readings including a battery meter. Along with the regular shutter release, the camera also has a very interesting main switch, which expands into a digital preview-shutter release switch. Through this switch, the camera shoots a picture with the applied settings, without automatically changing the focus or applying any other automatic settings like the camera flash. This is a great feature for checking out the depth of field, as the pictures taken from this switch are not saved on the memory and are excellent for experimenting with manual settings without worrying about deleting the test shots later.