21 February 2015

Adieu Pentax

It's the third day of Chinese New Year 2015. As you can see there's a break of a few years from my last post. I went off the radar photographically speaking. The occasional sporadic opportunities to shoot were just too few and far between. The last few years was just a blur. Too much time in my day job that I had little or no time to take out my camera and shoot as a pastime.



In that time I still held on to my Pentax K5IIs and a whole bunch of lenses from fisheye to macro to telephoto. I had everything covered but I didn't have time to use them. And for my casual shooting needs I gravitated to a few compact cameras - the Pentax Q, the Ricoh GXR and the Canon G16.

Well I finally decided to make the tough decision to step away from Pentax and clear the dry cabinet of the all the nice lenses I had accumulated. It was a hard decision as there were lenses I loved dearly, the FA 43 and FA 77, the DA 70 and DA 35 Macro but my decision to do so was triggered by a few reasons.

My eyesight isn't getting better and squinting into an APS-C camera viewfinder got to be tedious. More importantly, I was thinking that I wanted a Full Frame camera and for so many years, I like many other Pentax users have been waiting patiently for Pentax to come out with one. Bottom line was I just couldn't wait any longer. I decided to switch... to the Nikon D610.

The used D610 I got offered great value. The price of FF has come down and used Nikon lenses can be picked up relatively cheaply. Unfortunately the value of my Pentax collection has taken a big hit. Fewer want the lenses as the user base has dwindled and everyone who has switched have already done so. Painful to do so but it had to be done.

Yes the new Pentax FF is slated to come out later in 2015 but like everything about Pentax, it's been too little and way too late. I have so many fond memories with Pentax but for now I have to bid adieu Pentax.