PENTAX *ISTDS2
Thankfully Some Things Never Change

I’m going to preface this review by saying that I’ve been a user of Pentax cameras since I began my career as a shutterbug. If that makes me a little biased toward any camera produced by Pentax, then so be it. I can remember my earliest days as a student, picking up an old silver bodied K-1000 SLR, and snapping portraits of my friends, sports events, and the local color of my home town. In fact, the first three years I used a camera I never strayed from the old trusty K-1000. Auto-focus, exposure lock, auto-advance and rewind, TTL Flash Metering; all had no meaning and no use for me. The K-1000 and a roll of Tri-X film where all I needed.

Naturally times have changed, and like most photographers these days, I’ve moved on to the digital medium. However, when Pentax announced a while back the introduction of the budget priced *ist D line of digital SLR’s, I couldn’t help but raise my head and pay close attention, remembering astutely the old K-1000 that introduced me to the wide world of photography. According to the early marketing campaigns, the Pentax *ist D promised to be a camera that harkened back to a simpler time and was the ideal choice in the digital SLR realm for beginners and enthusiasts who wanted nothing more then to shoot beautiful pictures in the simplest way possible.

I never got my hands on the early model *ist D, the *ist DS, or the more recent ultra-budget *ist DL. However, I was overjoyed when Pentax sent me a review model of their newest flagship D-SLR, the *ist DS2. It was time to see if all the hype and praise from old-school shooters was true, and if this was indeed the well-rounded camera worthy of the K-1000 namesake.

Taking the *istDS2 out of the box left me with a positive first impression. The camera is small for a D-SLR, but not frustratingly so. The hand grip is a good fit for my medium sized hands and with all accessories and lens in place, the *istDS2 is light weight, though still heavy enough to feel solid in construction and steady when moving in to take a shot. All basic shooting controls are easily accessible with my right hand leaving me free to keep my left on the barrel of the lens ninety-percent of the time. The back of the camera is dominated by a rather large review screen (compared to my now aging Canon 20D anyway) surrounded by the standard function buttons one typically finds with a D-SLR.

I have to admit, the *istDS2 is surprisingly sexy. Pentax did the right thing when it gave this little number a no frills, bare-bones kind of look. Even the Pentax logo emblazoned on the front of the camera is subtle when placed next to comparable models by bigger manufacturers. For those of us who like to take our shoots out of the studio and into the world at large, the *istDS2 is an ideal choice and isn’t going to draw a lot of attention from prying eyes. Right away I could tell this was an excellent design for street shooters and ‘guerilla’ photographers who work in large metro areas.

However, it’s simply not enough for a camera to be good looking in order to justify shelling out nearly one thousand dollars to own one. A camera has to actually be both useful and functional, and fortunately the *istDS2 performs admirably in both areas. The first thing I noticed when I took the *istDS2 out and began shooting is the more then generous size of the viewfinder. With many digital SLR’s this has been an area of big complaint on my end; not so with Pentax. The viewfinder found on the *istDS2 is big, bright, and though it lacks a focusing screen, it still has more then enough clarity to make manual focusing a breeze. I tip my hat to Pentax in a big way for giving photographers a viewfinder that is actually a pleasure to look through.

Another area I have to give praises to Pentax for is the fact that the *istDS2 is not only compatible with the entire line up of current Pentax lenses, but through the employment of an adaptor, a vast majority of discontinued and old manual Pentax lenses as well. For those of us who held on to our old manual focus Pentax lenses this is excellent news and for new shooters this opens up the used market meaning some very sharp and durable lenses can be purchased and employed on the *istDS2 for a song. It’s really too bad more manufacturers don’t do this, but if it’s only going to be one, I’m glad it’s Pentax.

Auto-focus is fast and accurate enough for my purposes. I’ve used other SLR’s that have performed better in this area but the difference is negligible at best, and basically a non-issue when shooting in the studio or under bright light conditions outdoors. I can picture a sports photographer or two having justification to complain in this area but shooting on the sidelines of a football field isn’t really what this camera was designed for anyway. Frame rate and buffer speed are good enough as well for my purposes and with a decent memory card this again should be more then adequate for most shooting situations.

When I took my test camera out into the field I shot exclusively in RAW mode and let the camera pick my exposure the vast majority of the time. After uploading the images and opening them in Photoshop, I found that the *istDS2 gave me nice even contrast and neutral saturation, giving me plenty of room to make adjustments and fine tune in post-processing. Noise levels where also respectable all the way to ISO 800, which is fairly standard for most D-SLR’s these days. The *istDS2 does feature the ability to adjust sharpness, contrast, and saturation within the camera, but like most photographers, I prefer to make such adjustments after a shoot and not before.

If I have one problem with the *istDS2, it comes in the available range of ISO options. The camera has an ISO range of 200 – 3200 which for most applications is more then usable. However, I can’t help but feel taking the extra step and making ISO 100 or better yet ISO 50 available would be even better; not only in terms of image noise but also for photographers such as myself who do a lot of shooting in very bright situations such as the beach, deserts, and ocean cliffs. Pentax isn’t the only manufacturer guilty of this offense with their digital SLR’s, however I did expect better.

Despite this one setback, I’d still strongly recommend the Pentax *istDS2 to anyone interested in learning the craft of photography, or a current photographer looking for a D-SLR to remind them why photography was fun in the first place. The *istDS2 is a solid no-nonsense shooting instrument, and though it may lack a lot of pizzazz, there are still those of us out there that consider such an attribute to be a good thing.