Pentax Espio 105SW, Kodak Vision2 100T in Fomadon LQN

[iangreenhalgh1]

Bought this nice little Pentax compact for 99p. Very nice looking camera and nice to use.

But, optically it's garbage, low contrast, quite a lot of distortion, soft, very soft at distance, just crap. It has a 28-105 lens and I bought it for the 28mm end, so I shot this test roll at 28, I didn't even bother scanning the remainder of the roll, by halfway the IQ was starting to upset me.


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[Attila]

Agree, I love first shoot , what a pity camera did ruin it.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Yes, this was just a test roll so wasn't taking that much care about artistic pictures or nice subject, but I like the first shot too.

I was surprised how crap the Olympus compact I tried the day before was, and now I'm surprised how crap this Pentax is. You would think these names would be associated with decent quality.

I suppose these cameras were designed to produce decent 6x4 machine prints from cheap colour print film and are incapable of doing much else.

[Drack]

[iangreenhalgh1]

Yes Drack, it would seem so.

I have bought a few more compacts to try out, all were 99p

Ricoh RZ-3000 (38-130mm lens, aspheric elements, 2 control dials, seems a quite high-end model)
Werlissa AF Sport 404 (29mm lens)
Ricoh AF-80 (30mm lens, hopefully the same lens they put in the R1 and R10)

[skida]

Those results remind me of how the camera on my LG phone performs. Infinity is never sharp, so I believe the thinking was that the majority of users would be shooting friends in the near distance most of the time, so they set the focus for that.

[Attila]

[iangreenhalgh1]

Shame they spoilt what is a very nice little camera with such a shoddy lens 6 elements to cover 28-105, obviously a cheap design, I have a Konica 28-135 zoom lens with 18 elements.