A few words about the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome

I recently had the opportunity to take a few pictures with a very nice, almost new, Pentax K-3 III Monochrome. Because I shoot regularly with a Pentax KP and like the Pentax “Limited” prime lenses, I was curious about the K-3 III – how much of an improvement was it over a camera of the previous generation like a KP or a K-5 II – and about Monochrome Digital – how different was it from shooting with a film camera loaded with Ilford’s or Kodak’s best?

The Pentax K-3 III Monochrome is essentially a “normal” Pentax K-3 III dSLR, but equipped with an imaging sensor deprived of the usual set of color filters (forming the so-called Bayer matrix) usually present in almost all other digital cameras. In the absence of the Bayer filters, the imaging sensor of the K-3 III Monochrome can’t capture any color related information, only luminance signals.

But a monochrome sensor will capture images with a better resolution and with less noise (for a same ISO sensitivity) than a comparable “Bayer Matrix” enabled sensor, because there is no mosaic of filters between the lens and the sensor to absorb some of the light, and no demosaicing algorithm to reduce the resolving power of the sensor.

“Monochrome” – One of the clues that it’s not a normal dSLR.

KP or K-3 III (the Bayer Matrix version)

The K-3 III Monochrome is in a category of its own – as far as I know, there isn’t another monochrome DSLR currently available on the market. That said, the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome is, in every other respect, a K-3 III fitted with a different sensor. As a result, many of the observations I make about the K-3 III Monochrome also apply to the standard Bayer-equipped, color-capable K-3 III.

Let’s start with the hard facts – the KP was launched in 2017 and discontinued in 2021, and the K-3 III (the “Bayer” version) was released in 2021. The K-3 III Monochrome joined the fray in 2023, and both K-3 III models were still available new as late as last year (all three models are only available on the second hand market now). Apart from the sensor, the K-3 III and the K-3 III Monochrome are virtually identical.

When Pentax were defining the specifications of the KP, they were not trying to propose a direct successor of the Pentax K-3 II which was reaching the end of its commercial life. The KP was deliberately deprived of features generally found in cameras targeting advanced amateurs and pros (like dual SD card slots) to leave room for a more elaborate (and more expensive) camera that would be launched a few years later, the K-3 III. Today, when compared to a K-3 III, the KP has therefore the double handicap of being at the same time older and not as well spec’d.

The KP and the K-3 III are clearly close relatives – with very similar size and weight, and a similar organization of the controls and commands. Even the sensors are not that different (a 24 Mpix of the 2017 generation for the KP vs a 25.7 Mpix from 2021 for the K-3 III).

*The body of the K-3 III Monochrome is entirely … monochrome*

That being said, the K-3 III (and the K-3 III Monochrome) represent a marked improvement over the KP – they have all the features – dual card slot, top plate LCD display and big battery – that enthusiast photographers expect.

And a larger optical viewfinder, with a higher enlargement factor (1.05 instead of 1.0), and a finer and more luminous mate screen. The KP’s viewfinder is very good in its own right, but visibly not as nice as the K-3 III’s, which is probably the best viewfinder gracing any APS-C dSLR camera. Ever.

The K-3 III’s ergonomics are better with a large handgrip and a more easily accessible front dial, but with a leather half case the KP becomes fairly acceptable, at least for me. The battery of the K-3 is larger (1860 mAh instead of 1040 mAh on the KP), but the battery life of the latter, while disappointing for a dSLR, is still in the realm of tolerable for an amateur shooting less than 350 frames per session.

*The user interface is well designed, but more complex that the Pentax KP’s*

The K-3 III is a more recent camera, and like its modern mirrorless competitors, has a touch enabled LCD display. The focusing point is selected with a joystick, and the K-3 III supports low power Bluetooth connections and in-camera USB-C charging.

Lastly, because I only had the opportunity of shooting with my usual screw-drive autofocus lenses, I can’t offer an opinion about the K-3’s autofocus ultimate performance. And the K-3 III being limited to monochrome images, I can’t comment on how the image processing engine of the K-3 III (“Bayer”) renders colors in the JPEGs it generates. Autofocus speed and JPEG quality are both reported to be improved over the KP by photographers who have used the K-3 III with lenses with an integrated autofocus motor.

To summarize, the K-3 III is a better camera in every metric, much closer – at least for stills photography – to the state of the art mirrorless APS-C cameras of the Big Four than the nine year old KP.

*An interior – shot at 1600 ISO – Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, Pentax 35mm f:2.4 AL*

The K-3 III beats the KP on performance, convenience and comfort. And it may very well be the most elaborate APS-C dSLR ever made (fighting for the crown with the Nikon D500). But would it help me deliver better pictures, more frequently?

I bought a Pentax KP last year because I felt that sometimes, I needed a break from mirrorless cameras – I wanted to reconnect with the pleasure of a good optical viewfinder and of a well thought (and simple) interface. That I like the colors of the images delivered by the KP when paired with Pentax’s “Limited” primes is a cherry on the cake.

When you shoot with a K-3 III, the changes over the KP seem more incremental than revolutionary. More “nice to have for an amateur like me” rather than “absolutely, definitively, have to have”.

*Rigid light on a Jeep Wrangler. Shot in a parking lot.* *200 ISO – Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, Pentax 35mm f:2.4 AL*

At the end of the day, it’s about choosing between Very Good and the Ultimate Best. There is no doubt that the K-3 III is a better camera. But for my use case and my style of images, the KP fits the bill. On the second hand market, a nice KP can be found for $600 when a K-3 III (the “Bayer” version) is going to cost at least $1400. A photographer heavily invested in the Pentax K system will be of a different opinion, but as far as I am concerned, I find it hard to justify paying that much for the incremental improvements brought by a K-3 III.

“Monochrome Digital” and B&W film photography

The Pentax K-3 III Monochrome is unique: there are very few cameras with monochrome sensors on the market – only Leica, Pentax and Ricoh have monochrome versions of some of their models, and only one is a digital SLR, the K-3 III.

I hardly shot a hundred of pictures with the K-3 III Monochrome. It does not make me an expert in digital monochrome photography, and I can’t offer a definitive opinion on this camera (I linked two good analysis of the K-3 III Mono at the bottom of this post).

*Foca Universal – shot at 1600 ISO – Pentax K-3 III Monochrome – Pentax 35mm Macro Limited*

But I learned at least one thing in the process: “Monochrome Digital” is not a way to shoot black and white pictures while saving money on B&W film. Monochrome Digital is a different type of medium altogether.

Images taken Straight Out of the Camera (SOC) are at the same time much smoother (no grain, with a larger dynamic range) and much more detailed than B&W film negatives, in particular in the shadows. Images are generally perfectly usable SOC, but are also more malleable and the photographer will be more frequently tempted to play with the tonal response (the S-Curve) than when shooting in color with a digital camera.

Taking advantage of a monochrome sensor will require a specific photographic style, and a specific post-processing workflow. There will be a learning curve before a photographer gets the images he or she can really be proud of. “Monochrome Digital” is definitely a commitment.

I tried to shoot a few urban landscapes, without much success (“it’s not the camera, it’s me…”) but I was impressed by the close-ups I took with a macro lens, and by pictures of interiors. In the right hands, this camera definitely has a huge potential.

*Pentax ME – shot at 1600 ISO – K-3 III Monochrome – Pentax 35mm Macro f:2.8 Limited*

When it was still available as a new camera a few months ago, the K-3 III Monochrome was selling for $200.00 more than the already very expensive K-3 III “Color”. Today, there are very few K-3 III Monochrome cameras available in the second hand market, most of them located in Japan. They typically sell between $1900 and $2300 once tariffs, fees and shipping costs have been added.

dSLRs are now relegated to a small niche, and a monochrome digital SLR is an extremely narrow niche within an already small niche. For a photographer seriously committed to digital monochrome photography, the K-3 III Monochrome is an interesting proposition, easier to use than a Leica M (it’s an autofocus dSLR) and more flexible than a Leica Q or a Ricoh GR (its lenses are interchangeable). But I don’t think I’m ready for it.

Other opinions about the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome

Andy Westlake in Amateur Photographer: “If you’re a Pentax user with a nice set of APS-C lenses, who loves shooting in black & white and has the money to spare, it’s an easy recommendation. It’s a fine camera that will repay you with superb results.” https://amateurphotographer.com/review/pentax-k-3-mark-iii-monochrome-review/

Keith Wee in his blog: “Like the Leica Monochrom cameras, the Pentax K-3 Mark III Monochrome removes the distraction of colour and replaces it with an immense tonal canvas” (https://keithwee.com/2025/12/10/a-first-impressions-review-of-the-pentax-k-3-mark-iii-monochrome/)

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*The usual suspect – The neighborhood restaurant (yes, it used to be a Baptist church).* 200 ISO – *Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, Pentax 35mm f:2.4 AL*

*Cine-Kodak Eight-25 (Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, Pentax DA 35mm Macro f:2.8 Limited).*

*Max, French Bulldog (Pentax K-3 III Monochrome, Pentax DA 35mm f2.4 AL)*.

Pentax 17: a compact film camera like no other

I bought another compact film camera. Second hand, of course, you don’t change a winning formula. But not a vintage this time. This one was manufactured in 2024.

I had been intrigued by the recent proliferation of new “semi-premium” compact film cameras. In the $500 to $800 price range. Cameras like Mint’s re-interpretation of the Rollei 35, Lomo’s MC-A and Pentax’s 17. Three original designs, with not much in common, except for the use of a wide angle prime lens and of course, of 35mm film.

I had read the reviews, watched the Youtube videos. And I picked my champion. The Pentax 17. Because it’s different. Reviewers have compared Mint’s AF 35 to the classic Rollei 35 that inspired it, and the Lomo MC-A to the pinnacle of compact film cameras, the darling of the influencers, the Contax T2. Nobody has found a classic camera they could compare the Pentax 17 to.

*Pentax 17* – *note the zone focus icons on the bezel of lens – a mirror makes the selected icon visible in the viewfinder.*

This blog entry is not going to be another review of the Pentax 17. There are enough of them already. And on the whole, they’re positive. Reviewers generally approve of the lens and of the metering system. And when they complain, it’s because they were secretly longing for a modern Contax T2.

For those complainers, the lens and the exposure determination system of the P17 were wasted on a camera that offered the controls of a cheap toy. As if Leica had put their best glass or Nikon their best exposure metering system on a Holga.

The Pentax 17 was not designed to be a substitute to a manual focus SLR or to a rangefinder camera. The goal of its creators was to bring new people to film photography, and, eventually, to force seasoned photographers out of their zone of comfort. Let’s see how I adjust to it.

*Two images in a standard 36×24 frame – it makes digitizing a bit more challenging.*

The context

Pentax at its core is a single lens reflex company – starting with its name – which evokes the pentaprism of a SLR. Contrarily to Canon or Ricoh who came to SLRs after having sold rangefinder cameras in the nineteen fifties, Pentax had never designed or sold any camera that was not a SLR before they launched their first autofocus compact camera in 1982. And contrarily to Canon or Ricoh, they had never sold a half-frame camera either.

For their return to film, Pentax could have made a re-edition of one of their best programmed auto exposure, autofocus, motorized 24×36 cameras. An Espio Mini of sorts. The same, but built with modern electronic components and with a one year warranty. Demand would probably have kept their production lines buzzing.

*Pentax 17 – on the right side of the viewfinder the two “idiot lights” – the connector on the right is for the jack of the remote control*

They chose to start from a blank sheet instead, and targeted an audience with limited experience in “legacy”, conventional photography (that is to say, taking pictures with a stand alone, dedicated camera that consumes film). The Seventeen is something without any precedent in Pentax’s own history (or any other camera manufacturer for that matter). And it could not make everybody happy.

A few words about the specs

You have to consider the Pentax 17 from the point of view of a person who is new to film photography, and whose experience of image capture is often limited to the camera app of a smartphone, and to a few snapshots taken with a disposable camera.

For people aspiring to film photography, the cost of a roll of film, and the cost of having it processed are the first two hurdles to clear. Pentax elected to resurrect the “Half Frame” format – meaning that instead of an horizontal image of 36x24mm, the Pentax 17 captures a vertical image of 17x24mm. Twice as many images on the same roll of standard 24×36 film.

*Pentax 17 – note the unusual modes on the mode dial, and the presence of an exposure compensation dial.*

“Legacy” photographers know how to take care of the exposure, they master the magic exposure triangle (aperture-shutter speed-film sensitivity) and understand how the depth of field works.

“Creators” used to camera apps did not have to bother with any of that to get great images. Pentax have tried to simplify their task by tying the automatic exposure modes and focusing in interesting (and original) ways:

Focusing (moving the lens assembly) is motorized, in a sort of fly by wire arrangement.
Depending on the auto exposure mode selected by the photographer, focusing can be “automatic” or left to the responsibility of the photographer.
Pentax does not give a lot of information about the “Auto” mode. When the camera is set to “Auto”, it selects a narrow aperture (my guess is something varying between f/8 and f/16), and sets the focus to a point that maximizes the depth of field (another guess: 2.50m). Pentax deliberately don’t use the word “hyperfocal”, but that’s what it looks like. The focus ring is inoperative, but if there’s enough light, subjects located between 1m and the infinity should be reasonably in focus. In the “Auto” mode, the camera behaves more or less like a very nice fix focus point and shoot.
If the Program mode is selected, aperture will vary between f/3.5 and f/16, and the shutter speed between 4 sec and 1/350 sec.
A “Night” and a “Bokeh” modes can be selected to force the camera to use slow shutter speeds in the first case, or to operate at the widest aperture in the second case.
The built-in electronic flash is activated automatically in the Auto mode (of course), but the Program and the Night modes can be selected in either of two versions – one with the flash, one without.
In all exposure modes other than “Auto”, focusing is under the responsibility of the photographer, who will be guided by icons (mountain, group of people, …) or by a conventional distance scale. That’s the so-called zone-focus.

*Inman Park neighborhood, Atlanta. Pentax P17, Fujifilm Acros 2 film.*

The P17 does not offer conventional ways to determine the aperture or the shutter speed (no PASM selector, no aperture or shutter speed ring). What the Seventeen proposes, at best, are indirect ways to influence the aperture /shutter speed combination. Which may be great for beginners: Program if you want some control over the focus and the use of the flash, Bokeh, when you want the blurry backgrounds, Night and Bulb when you want long exposures, and Auto when you want to enjoy an event and not have to think too hard about any of the settings.

*Pentax 17 – it’s not really pocketable and it’s a bit larger than the typical compact-zoom of the 1990s.*

First photo stroll

Contrarily to those reviewers who expected Pentax to release a modern Nikon 28ti, I have no complaint about the appearance or the build quality of the camera – it has obviously been designed, manufactured and assembled with care, with components of quality. The top and base plate are in magnesium, the rings click discreetly when you rotate them, the film advance lever is smooth, the tactile experience is rewarding. The viewfinder is large with bright projected frame lines, and the lens is a glass triplet, treated with Pentax’s most recent “HD” coatings.

I’ve never set the P17 in its Auto, fix focus-emulator, mode. I don’t see the point. Most of my images were shot in the Program mode, a few in Bokeh and a handful with the flash on.

Shoot with the Pentax 17 in Program mode for a few minutes, and a few things immediately strike you:

The two LEDs in the viewfinder keep on flashing – it’s the camera telling you that you have left the lens cap in place, or forgotten to rearm the shutter, or that you should enable the electronic flash. After 60 minutes, the camera has trained you, and the warnings are far less frequent.
The viewfinder shows you an image oriented vertically. Of course you can rotate the camera 90 degrees left or right and compose an horizontal image, but the camera is designed to incite you to shoot as many vertical images as possible.
focusing is un-assisted: on a “normal” camera, you don’t have to think hard about the focus – the camera is either autofocus, or equipped with efficient focusing aids – a rangefinder, a focusing screen, a ring of micro-prisms, a split image telemeter. Here, nothing. You have to determine the focus on your own – with the sole assistance of a few icons. It’s not extremely difficult, but it’s a task you have to accomplish every time you’re facing a new scene.
On a typical photo stroll in the street or in a park, you rapidly take the habit of anticipating, adjusting the focus in advance… just in case what you see 50 ft ahead becomes an interesting scene when you get closer.

*the distance scales (in feet and in meters) under the lens, the zone focus icons above.*

Is it a keeper?

I don’t know if the camera reached its target audience – I only know that Ricoh-Pentax have no plan to follow up with another film camera at the moment.

Like Fujifilm, Ricoh (the corporation, not the team of enthusiasts who are developing new cameras) seem to be happy to have successfully transitioned out of film, and to have survived the contraction of the photography market during the COVID years. They don’t seem to have much appetite for the risks inherent to a return to the film business, that they had worked so hard to escape from.

The Pentax 17 is one of a kind in the current photography landscape. Not because it’s consuming film, but primarily because it involves the photographer differently. It’s a sort of unique combination of characteristics normally found on toy and fix focus cameras, with the build quality, the lens and the exposure determination system of a “serious” camera.

The photographer has no direct control of the aperture or the shutter speed, and only an approximative control of the focusing distance. The limited control over the aperture and the focusing distance naturally leads to simpler compositions, as the photographer cannot precisely manage the depth of field, or take advantage of the longer reach of a non-existent zoom to isolate the subject.

But it would be wrong to assume that the P17 is no different than an entry level film point and shoot – that you can get for $5.00 or less in garage sales. Point and shoot compact cameras are far less involving and could easily be replaced by a smartphone. And the fact is that they were.

The 17’s zone focusing forces the photographer to anticipate how the scene could develop and pre-set the focus accordingly. The camera encourages the photographer to frame vertically, and to pair the images in diptychs. And to use special effects modes like “bokeh” or “night”. To plan. To think. Beyond the pleasant tactile experience that shooting with the Seventeen offers, that’s where the fun resides.

Does it have a future in my photo bag? Definitely – because shooting with the Pentax 17 is a challenge, and an experience that no other camera, past or present, can totally emulate.

More about the Pentax 17 in those pages in a few weeks – after a few more rolls of film.

*Family reunion. The film rewind lever of the 17 is designed to remind old Pentaxians of the ME/MX series*

Why 17?

Along this page, I kept on calling the camera indifferently “17”, “P17” or “Seventeen”. But its official name is “Pentax 17”.

17, because the negative of a half frame camera is 17mm wide.

What’s to like?

It’s different – it’s not “another compact film camera”
It’s different – it has to be used it with intent.
The build quality
The visual and tactile experience
Half frame – twice as many frames for the same cost

What’s NOT to like?

It’s different – and its talent is wasted if you simply use it as a basic point and shoot compact camera, in Auto mode
The mode selector knob: too soft
The frame counter: too small
The half frame negatives – they’re small and require more care (processing, scanning) than larger negatives.

How Much?

The Pentax 17 is still on Pentax’s catalog, and available (new) from major photo retailers for $499. So far pricing has been very solid and nobody is discounting it (you get one or two free rolls of film with the camera, at best). Very few Seventeens are available on the second hand market. When they are, they sell from the high three-hundreds to the mid four-hundreds.

More about the p17

https://www.35mmc.com/17/06/2024/pentax-17-review/

https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/blogs/film-photography-blog/pentax-17-camera-review

https://www.pentaxforums.com/reviews/pentax-17/introduction.html

The featured picture: *the film window is much smaller than usual, and in a vertical orientation. It’s a “half-frame” camera.* *Note the modern (and very efficient) film loading system.*

All b&W pictures below were shot on Fujifilm Acros 2 film, and digitized on a Fujifilm XT-4 body with a Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 lens and the JJC digitizing adapter.

*My usual benchmark – the local Bartaco restaurant.*

*A Volvo. The zone focus was set on the right headlight. But without knowing the selected aperture and the exact focusing distance, depth of field is a wild guess.*

*Sweetwater Creek Park – With 100 ISO film and a grey weather, the lens was probably operating close to full aperture and did a very good job (you can even see the float at the end of the line).*

The $7.00, Five Below Reusable Photo camera and its $7.00 film cartridge

For the readers not familiar with the American retail landscape, Five Below is a chain of stores selling “stuff” (cosmetics, candies, gadgets, beach towels, electronics) for really cheap, like $5.00 and below. Not eveything is under $5.00 – the reusable, waterproof film camera, and the b&w film it needs are both priced over that symbolic mark, at $7.00. There is a cheaper version of the same camera. Selling for $5.00. But I elected to spend two extra dollars to get the waterproof variant. It’s the same camera, simply inserted in a transparent waterproof shell.

While I was at it, I decided to splurge and also bought two 10 frame cartridges of Five Below’s 100 ISO B&W film. 10 (yes, ten) frames for $7.00. One roll for the Five Below camera, the other for my benchmark, the Minolta AF-C – an autofocus camera from 1982.

Research on the Web and on ChatGPT did not return any useful information about this film, but $0.70 a frame for a Chinese film of unknown provenance, it’s not exactly a bargain when B&H will sell you a 36 frame cartridge of Ilford’s excellent FP4 for less than $12.00.

It looks like Five Below are applying the tried and tested Gillette pricing technique – sell the razor at cost, and make a comfortable profit on the blades.

*The Five Below waterproof film camera, next to the Minolta AF-C – loaded with the same film.*

The Five Below camera is obviously not an original design. A similar fix focus, 28mm point and shoot camera has been sold (or given away) under various brand names in the past. The camera is almost totally made of plastic, as I doubt that there are more than three metal parts in it. At best a spring in the shutter mechanism. And two small metal rods to keep the door of the waterproof case in place. And not a single part is made of glass.

The lens is a 28mm f/8 piece of plastic (probably a simple meniscus). The shutter is calibrated to deliver 1/100sec snapshots. And, contrarily to all disposable cameras, this one has no electronic flash.

The Five Below film cartridge next to Fujifilm’s Acros II – Note that the leader of the Five Below film is cut straight.

Strangely enough, it does not look as lightly built as most disposable, single use, cameras. Loading the camera with Five Below’s film is surprisingly easy. Maybe it’s thanks to the unusual shape of the film leader. It’s cut straight, when every other roll of 35mm film I’ve seen is tapered. What works well for the Five Below does not work for cameras that expect a tapered leader, like this Minolta AF-C – I had to cut the leader to give it the shape of a “normal” 135 film.

Developing the Five Below film

The only indication provided is that the film has to be processed in D76 chemistry. No other direction is provided. Considering the film is very likely a respooled / unbranded industrial or cinema-derived film, I decided to develop the film for a longer time than what a usual 100 ISO photography stock would require. With my usual Tetenal Parvofin tabs at the “economy” dilution, I opted for a development time of 6 minutes at 26∘𝐶.

The cartridge is made of two half shells of plastic that are clipped together. Opening the cartridge to extract the film does not require a cartridge opener – I simply pried it open with a screwdriver (in a changing bag, obviously).

*Five Below 100 ISO B&W – the empty film cartridge.*

Compared to my usual Ilford or Kodak film, I found the film more difficult to spool on the Paterson spirals – it seems that the film base is made of a clear and rigid type of plastic (probably PET) rather than the triacetate used by almost all 135 film manufacturers – which could explain that the film advance is so stiff on the Reusable, and that I got involuntary double exposures on the Minolta AF-C.

Once developed, the film does not show any marking – the manufacturer will remain unknown – but contrarily to what I was afraid of, the processed negatives look OK, in particular those shot with the Minolta AF-C, which are clearly more defined than the negatives of the Five Below Reusable.

Five Below Reusable – Five Below 100 ISO Film – Sweetwater Creek Park

Two pictures taken from the same vantage point at the same time – the photo taken with the Five Below Reusable is dull compared to the image taken with the Minolta.

The total length of the film strip is 19in 1/2 (49cm), but unless you load the camera in a dark room and only lose one exposure to the loading process, it will be difficult to get 10 exposures out of the roll of film (I got 7 on each of the cameras, but I could have probably squeezed 9 exposures out of them had I been less risk adverse).

I also lost one exposure in the middle of the roll shot with the Five Below camera (the shutter probably did not fire), and one to a partial and totally involuntary double exposure on the Minolta (which is a very reliable camera, normally). The unusual stiffness of the film may have caused it, but I suspect that the real reason is that the film had not been spooled regularly.

Five Below vs Minolta

The Minolta AF-C is a fine camera. The film advance is smooth, the viewfinder large and accurate, with a clearly defined projected frame, and the 35mm f/2.8 lens is true to the premium positioning of the camera when it was new. The auto-exposure system and the autofocus did their job and the negatives are correctly exposed and as sharp as the film permits them to be.

The Five Below Reusable Photo Camera fared better than I expected. The viewfinder is poorly implemented (it shows you the angle of view of a 40mm lens, when the lens is actually a 28mm), and the word “resistance” was invented to describe the film advance ratchet wheel. Not a pleasant experience, but you still get usable negatives in the end. The negatives lack density – which clearly points to under-exposure. The camera has no way – manual or automated – to adjust the shutter speed or the aperture to the luminosity of the day, and on the day I took the pictures, the weather was overcast. The negatives are also mushy, the lens is definitely not a champion of sharpness: the image quality is low without being unacceptable, but there is no light leak and the frames are evenly spaced on the film.

As a conclusion

The “Five Below Reusable Photo Camera” looks cool in its pale blue color, and the little lobsters are fun. It’s deprived of a flash, and will only be usable outdoors, by good weather. On the beach, or practicing water sports. If you lose it or drown it, no big deal – you’ve only lost $7.00. Some of the issues I observed – the very stiff film advance, in particular, were probably caused by the film, and are not to be blamed on the camera.

I have no idea of the life expectancy of the camera – you will certainly be tired of it before it gets tired of you. Kodak, Ilford, Yashica and a few other propose much nicer reusable cameras (with a flash) for approximately $50.00, and a patient buyer will be able to score a very good motorized, autofocus compact zoom camera made in the nineteen nineties by Canon, Minolta, Nikon or Pentax for less than $35.00 (shipping and handling included) on their favorite auction site.

Lightroom settings with Five Below 100 ISO film

Left – the Five Below 100 ISO film reacts like “normal” B&W film – Right – there are better low budget options that this Five Below camera

The resulting images will be much better, and the price difference between the different models of cameras becomes negligible once you start considering that a photo lab will charge you many times the price of the Five Below camera to simply develop your first film and print 10 images.

As for the Five Below B&W 100 ISO film, in a good camera, it will deliver images which are not bad at all, with decent sharpness and contrast. There is no light leak, no dust, and all images are usable. But I can’t recommend it.

The PET base, those short 49cm strips, the absence of any film marking or processing direction, the straight cut leader, the same clipsable plastic film cartridges used by photographers spooling (not very well) their film at home, everything points to a low budget scrap recycling project. For the same price you can get a 36 frame roll of Ilford’s Kentmere 100. As such, this Five Below film is massively, obscenely, terminally overpriced. To be avoided.

The Five Below Waterproof case and the camera that goes inside. The pictures of this blog post were taken with the camera out of the waterproof shell – no need to add another layer of plastic between the scene and the film.

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*Minolta AF-C – Five Below 100 ISO – Sweetwater Creek Park*

The never ending story of the Pentax KP’s interchangeable hand grip

There is much to like in the Pentax KP – it’s a well spec’d, well designed, compact and solid APS-C dSLR, and when paired with the best of the Pentax “Limited” primes, it will deliver really beautiful pictures. One of its unique selling propositions was that the handgrip gracing the right side of the body was removable, and could be had in three different sizes, small, medium and large. Like a Starbucks latte. Most KPs came with the small grip, which, in my experience, made this relatively heavy camera (700g before you mount a lens on it), extremely uncomfortable to hold and shoot with. For more ranting about the small grip, you can read the first part of my review of the Pentax KP in an earlier blog post.

I bought my KP sight-unseen as part of a lot which also included a 35mm prime lens, a Pentax branded sling bag, and the Pentax D-BG7 battery grip. Unfortunately it came with the small hand grip in place, and after a few minutes, I already knew that I had to do something about it.

How the grips are mounted on the body (here, the large grip)

Because I had always used my Fujifilm digital cameras with a half case in place, I expected that doing the same with the KP would make the camera more pleasant to shoot with. And it did. I located a leather half case on AliExpress, and received it a few days after placing the order.

*Pentax KP with the small grip and the AliExpress leather half case*

But I was still curious about the Pentax native solution. I started looking for information about the “large” handgrip. Based on the little tidbits I could find, I came to hope that it would be a better fit for me than the small one. But if factual information about the large battery grip was scarce, the grip itself (Model O-GP1762 in Pentax’s back catalog) was even more difficult to locate.

After a few failed attempts, I finally bought it second hand from a Japanese online store. Once tariffs, custom fees and FedEx shipping were added to the asking price, my used large grip cost me more than $100.00 – a lot of money for a mere hand grip. But a sacrifice I had to make if I wanted to publish today my totally original, totally fresh and totally AI free detailed review of the Pentax O-GP1762 hand grip.

Comparing the small and the large grip

The grips are of similar quality, and are mounted on the camera the same way. Their height and width are roughly identical. What makes the difference, of course, is the depth, and where the extra depth is located.

The small grip is 2.1cm deep, and when mounted on the camera, the total depth (camera+grip) is 4.9cm

The large grip is 3.1cm deep, and when mounted on the camera, the total depth (camera+grip) is 6.1cm

1.2 cm equates to 3/8in – not much of a difference if you just consider the figures, but the two grips are not shaped identically, and provide a different user experience.

The “AliExpress” leather Half Case

AliExpress is just the marketplace. Not the manufacturer. It’s made by a company in Shenzen. And I don’t know if the half case is really made of leather. Probably not. But for lack of another way to describe it, we’ll call it the “AliExpress Leather Half Case“

It’s well designed and well made. It is available in many colors – this one is black, obviously, and it complements the KP very well.

The user experience

The fact that the camera is so much more comfortable to use with the battery grip in place (irrespective of the hand grip installed on the camera), points to the real issue with the KP’s design: the body of the camera is simply not high enough, and would have benefited from being half an inch higher (1.25cm).

Without the battery grip, the “Small” hand grip is far too small, and the “Large” hand grip hardly large enough.

The small grip forces the photographer to pinch the right side of the camera between their thumb and their three longest fingers (no room for the pinkie), and it requires a significant effort to simply keep the KP steady. You can’t hold the camera with the right hand only and reach the control wheels or the shutter release. It imposes a two hand operation, all the time.

With the large grip in place, holding the camera with one hand for more than a few seconds becomes possible. It’s also easier to reach the rear control wheel and the shutter release, because you have a much better … grip on the camera. I would have liked the large grip to be just a tad bigger to give my fingers a little more space. But following my old habit of taking a loop of the neck strap around my wrist steadies the camera when I walk around my subject looking for the right angle, and operating the KP with one hand becomes a possibility.

The “AliExpress” leather half case has to be paired with the small hand grip. But if the large hand grip is an improvement over the small one, the half case is an improvement over the large grip. It adds volume where it’s needed the most – at the bottom of the camera, and the leather is more pleasant to the fingers holding the camera than the metal of the base plate. A great combination, in particular if you shoot with small prime lenses.

With the battery grip in place, the camera becomes really pleasant to use. Paired with the small grip, the set looks a bit weird, but it’s perfectly usable. The large grip and the battery grip were designed to be used together – they’re a perfect fit, and if it did not make the camera so big, it’s how I would configure mine all the time.

Small grip and battery grip – a usable, but not really compact set up.

Small grip and battery grip – compare with the same picture taken with the large grip in place.

As a conclusion

dSLRs have become a niche in the market of digital image capture devices. And Pentax a niche within a niche. And the KP, well, a niche within a niche within a niche. Pentax have to be deliberately “different” if they want to have a chance to survive, and the KP was an attempt at proposing a “different” dSLR. The retro-inspired design and the interchangeable handgrips were supposed to be big differentiators, but were probably the answers to two questions nobody had really asked. In the end, the KP’s niche within the niche within the niche proved too small even for Pentax, and the KP had no successor.

Don’t get me wrong – the Pentax KP is a very likable camera (you can check the second part of my review), and it’s the one I use the most at the moment. I like its optical viewfinder, its third control wheel and the way the images are rendered with some of Pentax’s “Limited” prime lenses.

If you’re on the hunt for a second hand Pentax KP, and if money is no object, I would suggest that you try and find one already fitted with the large handgrip and the battery grip. It’s by far the best combination in terms of ergonomics, even if makes the combo a bit bulky. With the battery grip and the large hand-grip in place, the KP is definitely very pleasant to use, and when you need the camera to be more compact, you only have to detach the battery grip.

The second best option is to buy the body with the small handgrip, and order this leather half case from AliExpress. It’s a cheaper but perfectly valid solution to the KP’s small grip issue.

As for the “Large Handgrip” on its own, it’s very difficult to find, seriously expensive, and unless you pair it with the battery grip, it does not bring that much of an improvement in usability over the small grip.

Other grips options for the committed Pentax collector

In Japan only, Pentax released two J Limited variants of the KP, the Black and Gold, and the Dark Night Navy. Both came with a very large wooden hand grip, manufactured by Mirako Techno Wood, and finished respectively in red, and black. More about this unique offering in https://www.pentaxforums.com/articles/pentax-news/pentax-kp-j-limited-announced.html.

Both KP models command really high dollar on the collector market now (and the wooden hand grips were never sold separately from the J Limited bodies, as far as I know).

Pentax KP J Limited Black and Gold (source: eBay.com)

Buying in China or in Japan through AliExpress or eBay in the times of tariffs.

eBay and the Japanese camera retailers were relatively quick to adjust to this new world of tariffs. There is not much of a difference in the user experience – and your purchase is delivered at your door step almost as quickly as before (three to seven days). All the administrative complexity is hidden from the buyer, but at a cost. Between the tariffs themselves, the customs processing fees of multiple intermediaries, and the fact that Japanese sellers won’t ship with the postal service anymore and have to rely on more expensive carriers such as FedEx, you end up paying 20% to 30% more than before for the same piece of equipment.

I bought the leather half case from a Chinese seller through AliExpress – the user experience was as seamless as eBay’s. As for the impact of the tariffs on the cost of the case – I had paid $17.00 to eBay.com for a very similar half case two years ago. To be compared with the $54.99 I paid this time for the KP’s on AliExpress (and eBay was even more expensive).

The tariffs have not made buying from foreign sellers more difficult for the buyer – they’ve just made the process significantly more expensive.

*the featured image: Pentax KP – Large grip – 21mm prime lens – a nice combination*

Max, French Bulldog. Pentax KP – Pentax DA 21mm f/3.2 Limited lens

*Vickery Creek Park – Roswell, GA – Pentax KP – Pentax DA 21mm f/3.2 Limited*

*Toyota Supra – Pentax KP – Pentax DA 35mm f/2.8 Macro Limited*

Carrying all that gear – three sizes of camera bags

A “camera bag” search on amazon.com returns 40,000 references. And there are 70,000 camera bags for sale on eBay.com. Camera bags come in all shapes and forms, attempting to cover the needs of a nature photographer hiking at 18,000 ft as well as those of a street photographer carrying a rangefinder camera and 2 prime lenses in the public transportation system.

From left to right: *Manfrotto Advanced backpack, Pentax DSLR Sling 2 and Moment Balance sling 7 liter*

At this stage, I’ve settled on three camera bags, corresponding to three use cases:

a photo dedicated, “formal”, back pack: the Manfrotto Advanced MB MA3-BP-T (capacity: 24 liters). It replaces a Tamrac Tradewind backpack designed to meet an approaching set of requirements, that had reached the end of its life during one my recent travels.
a medium sized photo dedicated sling, the Pentax DSLR Sling 2 – Model 85231 (no more than 12 liters in my calculations)
and a smaller hybrid Every Day Carry (EDC), a sling bag with removable compartments: the Moment Balance Sling (capacity: 7 liters).

*How to wear a sling photo bag – front or bag (Source: shopmoment.com)*

Back pack and sling bags

Back packs have two shoulder straps, and will let you carry more weight and for a longer time than sling bags. Photo dedicated back-packs are generally designed to carry up to eighteen pounds, but retrieving the equipment typically requires to remove bag from one’s shoulders and place it on the floor. And carrying expensive equipment behind your back makes you a target for thieves in crowded settings.
Sling bags have only one strap, and can be carried in the back or in the front of the body, or in any position in-between. Carrying the bag in front of you addresses the “thief problem”, and grants an easy access the equipment (to change a lens for instance) without having to remove the bag and drop it on the ground. But because there is only one strap crossing the front of the chest, slings have a reduced ability to carry heavy loads.
The imagination of the marketing teams of the manufacturers of photo equipment is limitless, and all sorts of “hybrids” between conventional backpacks and slings exist.

*The perfect use case of a sling photo bag – taking the camera from the bag while walking.* (Source: Shopmoment.com)

The Manfrotto Advanced MB MA3-BP-T

it’s a true back pack, but designed for photographers. Finished in a dark (charcoal) and water repellent nylon-polyester blend, it’s more formal than casual, more urban dweller than overlander.
The main opening is lateral, but there are two shoulder straps. A photographer with a bit of upper body flexibility can slip their left shoulder out of the strap, letting the backpack hang from the right shoulder and making its contents accessible on the fly. This can work if the load is light, but in most cases, retrieving a lens still requires taking the bag off and setting it down.
the bag is large with a 24 Liter capacity – there is room for a 15in laptop and/or tablet (in two separate compartments), 1 or 2 dSLR bodies, a few lenses, batteries and power bricks. The photo equipment section is divided in four main configurable compartments, and a small bundle of clothes or toiletteries (one or two tee shirts, underwear, a toothbrush) can be carried in one of the compartments if the photographer is capable of travelling really (really) light. But there’s definitely no room for a jacket, a sweater or a beach towel if you’re also carrying photo equipment. There is a large pocket on the opposite site of the bag where a tripod can be stored, or a water bottle if you trust it not to leak.
Compared to a backpack like the Tamrac Tradewind 24L, the Manfrotto Advanced will carry much more photo equipment, but will not be as good at carrying change clothes and toiletteries. The two bags are equally comfortable if not too heavily loaded (you can keep them on your back for a whole day of sightseeing if you limit the payload to a few kilograms), but will strain your back if you load them at full capacity.
Fully loaded, they are at their best when travelling or commuting between two photo opportunities. In a plane, they’re narrow and flat enough to fit under the seat in front of you when the overhead bins are full.
As far as I know, Manfrotto bags are not sold in the US, but they are available in Europe and in Japan. I paid the equivalent of $110 USD for mine, which is a tremendous value for a very well built piece of luggage.

A more rugged alternative to the Manfrotto – the Tamrac Tradewind 24L backpack – good for a laptop, fresh clothes, a camera and two or three lenses (here an older model – the current models are black).

The Pentax dSLR Slingbag 2

It’s a typical photo dedicated, vertical, mid sized sling bag. There are equivalent models in the product lines of Thinktank, Lowepro, Mindshift, Tarion…
This bag is not available from Pentax or from big photo retailers anymore – there are a few new old stock (NOS) items on eBay, selling for approximately $80.00. Mine came with the Pentax KP I bought second hand from a thrift store.
There are three compartments – the one in the middle is the largest and will be for the camera and one lens, the top and the bottom compartments are smaller and will store accessories (like a flash or a charger), and maybe one or two small lenses in the bottom compartment. There is a mesh pocket on the right side of the bag, but in my experience anything you place in that pocket will fall as soon as you carry the bag as a sling.

This Pentax dSLR sling should have been named Pentax APS-C dSLR sling.

An interesting characteristic: the strap is central and the bag can be carried on the right or on the left shoulder, even if the opening of the central compartment is designed for photographers wearing the sling on their right shoulder. And it comes with a removable waist belt to keep the bag in place when cycling.
There is no reliable info about capacity – my estimate is around 11 or 12 Liters.
11 liters is rather capacitous: it fits an APS-C dSLR like the Pentax KP with its battery grip, or Fujifilm X-T4, both with a trans-standard zoom or a prime lens. The bag still has enough room for at least another zoom, another prime, a charger, a few batteries and a cobra flash. A full frame body and its pro-lens hardly fit, and the weight more than the volume becomes the problem.
The bag was designed in the early 2010s, and at that time Pentax had not imagined that photographers could not survive without a tablet or a bottle of water. There is no compartment – and no room – for any form of portable computer (maybe an iPad mini or a Kindle, but nothing larger than that), and no external compartment where even a small 500ml / 16.9 OZ bottle would fit.
The bag is comfortable as long as it’s not too heavily loaded (1 body, 1 prime, 1 standard zoom is the sweet spot). If you start adding a battery grip or a pro zoom (a constant aperture f/2.8 monster), the payload becomes a bit too heavy for the sling form factor (the strap compresses the chest) and it becomes difficult to carry the bag for more than a few minutes.
The “Pentax” branding, the black and grey colors and its general shape clearly indicate it carries photo equipment. And you can’t carry a bottle of water or a 9in tablet in it. But if you can live with those limitations, it’s a very good compromise for photographers on the move.

*Sling or backpack – it’s* *pretty obvious which one will be more comfortable on long walks. (Source: backpackies.com)*

Moment Balance Sling Bag (7 Liter)

This one is clearly designed with photographers in mind, but is not photo dedicated. There are lots of pockets for non-photo stuff, including a compartment for a standard 9in iPad (it’s a tight fit) or a Kindle. The central compartment is padded and lined with Velcro, and a removable divider will separate the camera body and its main lens, from a second lens. An elastic pocket under the bag is the ideal place for a water bottle. The Moment Balance Sling is fairly versatile: it can be used as small every day carry (EDC) if you carry some photo equipment, or as a large capacity EDC after you remove the compartment divider and leave the camera at home.

The sling as you carry it – the equipment is very easy to access.

The only part of this bag which is rigid is the removable divider of the main compartment- remove it and fold it, and the bag can be stored flat when not in use.
There is enough room for an APS-C camera like a Pentax KP or a Fujifilm X-T4 (without their battery grip), with a maximum of two compact lenses (one mounted on the body, the second next to it in the bag). I would not try to carry a pro full frame dSLR with a f/2.8 constant aperture zoom – the combination is too big, and above all too heavy.
Sling bags are designed to move easily around the torso of the photographer, but that very characteristic can be a serious drawback if you’re riding a bicycle – the Balance Sling comes with second strap equipped with a magnetic buckle, that will help stabilize the whole setup and keep the sling on your back while you’re on the move.
The Moment Sling is the perfect bag for a photo stroll – with the bag opening right in the front, there is little risk of equipment falling on the ground when you attempt to change a lens.
Lastly, the Moment Balance does not shout “photo equipment inside” – in fact, with its soft structure, its elastic mesh pockets at the front and its “moss” color, it looks like a tired surplus army bag and does not attract attention (it’s available in “sable” and “black” if you don’t like the military surplus look). That being said, it seems well built, with components of quality.
At $120, it’s pricey for what it looks like, but it does the job it’s been designed for.

*The Moment Balance Sling in “moss” color – note the soft structure, the two mesh pockets at the front, and the mesh tunnel at the bottom of the bag – perfect for a 500ml bottle of water*

Conclusion

There is an abundance of form factors on the marketplace – from high capacity backpacks with a bottom compartment that can be flipped laterally (for accessing the gear while hiking), to slings only large enough for a compact point and shoot camera.
Generally speaking, sling camera bags sacrifice the carrying capacity for the ability to be opened on the fly, while still wrapped around the body of the photographer.
More than the volume of the gear, its weight is the enemy – slings are OK if you carry one APS-C body and 2 lenses – they may still be OK-ish with a small mirrorless full frame camera, but in that case you should avoid carrying a large and heavy zoom. I can’t imagine carrying a full frame dSLR and a large aperture zoom in the Moment Balance. Even a full frame dSLR is a tight fit for the Pentax Sling, unless it’s paired with a small wide angle prime and not much else.
Even if the weight and the volume are contained, there is no guarantee that the sling will be comfortable (I returned a PGYTech sling because the body of the bag was too rigid and was pressing on my back, and the narrow strap was compressing my chest).
Backpacks like the Manfrotto are ideal to carry lots of equipment with elegance between two photo shoots, but too big for street photography and – if loaded to their maximum capacity, for a 5mi hike in the hills;
Small slings (6 or 7 Liter) are ideal if you can survive with a camera body, two small lenses and a bottle of water. They’re perfect for shooting in urban settings and for street photography. Larger slings (10 to 15 liters) will contain more equipment, but all slings become a pain to carry if you load them with more than a few pounds of gear.

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Backpacks or slings – Tokyo – Sensō-ji – Fujifilm X-T4.

Photo stroll with the Moment Balance and a Fujifilm X100T camera.

A sling is compact enough not to draw attention, not even in museums (here the Dolce Gabbana exhibit at Miami’s ICA). Fujifilm X100T.

The scene I’m facing and the image I see in my head

I just devoted two successive blog entries to the Pentax KP in the last two months. It’s my go-to camera at the moment, and I was wondering why I was neglecting my more modern mirrorless camera for an older dSLR.

I have a small set of very good Fujinon XF lenses and a mirrorless camera – a Fujifilm X-T4, that when properly set up, will deliver great pictures. The X-T4 is the camera I have with me on “important” occasions, when I know the result matters and I won’t have a second chance. And when traveling with the family because they won’t let me spend 20 minutes on a single picture, and I know the X-T4 will capture very good images, quickly.

But when there is no particular pressure to deliver, when I have the time to carefully compose the image and finesse the settings, I tend to use a single lens reflex camera. And I was wondering why.

*Casa Milo – Barcelona – Fujifilm X-T4 – Fujinon 10-24mm f/4 XF lens* (electronic viewfinder)

I guess that when I’m watching the scene through an optical viewfinder, it is easier for me to mentally project the final photograph. Through an optical viewfinder, I’m looking at the scene itself, unmediated by processing, and my brain actively completes the image, interpreting light, contrast, depth, and intent. Because I am looking directly at the scene, my brain remains responsible for transforming reality into an image.

The focusing screen does not dictate the outcome; it leaves space for intention, anticipation, and interpretation. I imagine the photograph before it exists, and I will work with the settings of the camera and shoot again and again until I’m pretty confident that I have captured the image I originally had in mind.

An electronic viewfinder, on the other hand, replaces mental projection with visual confirmation. The LCD shows me what the camera thinks the picture should look like, already interpreted — shaped by the camera’s exposure simulation, tone curves, and color rendering. It shifts my role from author to reviewer. Instead of projecting the image mentally, I am reacting to the camera’s preview. The act of imagining gives way to the act of evaluating.

*Gone Fishing – Atlanta, Chattahoochee National Recreation Area. Pentax KP – Pentax 35-105 lens.* (optical viewfinder)

It’s probably a question of habit. Because I had been shooting with single lens reflex cameras for so long, I simply kept on following the same routine when I started using a mirrorless camera – bringing the viewfinder to my eye, and looking at the scene through the lens of the camera until I had a clear idea of the image I wanted to create.

Composing an image through an electronic viewfinder required another approach – I needed to learn how to abstract from the relative information overflow of the EVF, and let my brain define the image I wanted to capture without being limited by what the camera had decided to show me. I’ve had ten years to adjust (and I assume I did), but shooting through an optical viewfinder is still more natural to me.

There are still enough photographers who want to compose their images through an optical viewfinder to keep Leica in business, and for Fujifilm to make a killing with the X-100 and its hybrid viewfinder. And there may even be enough OVFs fans over the world for a trickle of Canon, Nikon and Pentax new dSLRs to keep on coming from the production lines. For the time being.

*Corsica – view from MonteMaggiore – Fujifilm X-T4 – Fujifilm lens XC 15-45mm* – *I like contrasty images, and I often compose facing the sun, using its rays to shape the atmosphere and character of the image*. It’s much easier to do through an optical viewfinder.

Out of curiosity, among the readers of this blog, am I the only one with a preference for the clear, unmediated view of the scene offered by optical viewfinders?

*Providence Canyon State Park, Georgia – Nikon D750.* (optical viewfinder)

*Cochran Shoals, Atlanta – Pentax KP – Pentax DA 21mm Limited.*

*Vickery Creek – Roswell, GA. Pentax KP, Pentax DA 21mm Limited*

*Ball Ground – GA – inside the “Burger Bus” Pentax KP – Pentax lens 35mm f/2.8 Limited* (optical viewfinder)

*Driving around Montepulciano, in Tuscany – Fujifilm X-T4- Fujinon lens XF 10-24 F/4* ((electronic viewfinder)

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The last dSLRs with CCD sensors

The first generations of dSLRs from Konica-Minolta-Sony, Nikon, Olympus and Pentax were all built around CCD image sensors. Then, around 2006, the camera makers started integrating CMOS sensors, and within a few years CCD sensors were history.

Today, some photographers compare the images they get from their modern cameras (all equipped with CMOS sensors offering a very broad dynamic range and reaching very high ISO sensitivities without much noise), with the images they were taking with the best cameras of the CCD era, and they like the photos taken with the old cameras better. What is so special about CCD sensors, and why have they disappeared if they were so good?

A cenote near Cozumel – Pentax *ist DS – July 2007 (6 Megapixels CCD sensor)

Why CMOS won

For all the hype surrounding CCD sensors, they had reached their peak in the 2006-2009 years – the last CCD sensors from Kodak and Sony were either unreliable or performing poorly above 800 ISO – and the technology of CMOS sensors had much more potential.

In 2006, camera makers started switching to CMOS sensors because they saw three main advantages in them:

a much lower power consumption – we now tend to forget that the CCD’s high power consumption and the related heat dissipation were major engineering issues at that time,
a much faster data acquisition,
a potential for higher ISO performance and wider dynamic range.

Live-view (composing the photo on the rear LCD of dSLRs), video capture in available light and mirrorless cameras were only made possible by the generalization of CMOS sensors, and would have been next to impossible with the CCD sensor technology.

Why this love for CCD sensors ?

In a few words, photographers tend to believe that images captured with a CCD sensor equipped camera are more “film like”.

Venice - gondoliers — The film look? – *Venice – Gondoliers in the sun set. Nikon FE2. Fujicolor 400 film*

I suffered for you and watched half a dozen Youtube videos where the authors are comparing the pictures taken with some of the best CCD equipped dSLRs with images taken with the CMOS equipped cameras that immediately followed. The conclusion is that if you make a serious apples to apples comparison on RAW files (same brand of camera, same lens, same resolution), there may be a difference, but really minimal. Images taken with a CCD may have a bit more punch, a bit more contrast, and the transition between colors may be more abrupt than on images captured with a CMOS. But again, the differences are marginal, only visible to pixel peepers.

So, if the RAW files are to a large extend similar, where is the perception coming from, that CCD sensors deliver more natural images than CMOS sensors? Could it be that the supporters of CCD sensors are only shooting JPEGs?

CCD and CMOS are different technologies, and their noise characteristics are not the same. They also behave differently in presence of strong highlights (the tone curve of images captured with a CMOS sensor is linear, as opposed to film and, to a lesser extent, CCD, which have a more S shaped tone curve). At the beginning of the transition from CCDs to CMOS sensors, camera vendors had more experience dealing with the noise patterns and tone curve characteristics of the images coming from CCDs than from CMOS sensors, and as a consequence their JPEG rendering algorithms were giving more “natural” (understand crowd pleasing) results when starting from the raw data of CCDs.

The CCD bias of the JPEG Rendering engines did not last. Camera manufacturers learned how to take advantage of the larger dynamic range and the lower level of noise of CMOS sensors to deliver images that mimic film behavior more closely than CCD sensors ever did.

The generalization of CMOS also allowed a raise in the pixel density of the sensors, and with it the end of the need for an “anti-aliasing” filter (the Nikon d800e launched in 2012 was the first dSLR deprived of an AA filter). By 2014, the “new normal” was a camera with a 16 to 24 Megapixel sensor and no anti-liaising filter, capable of a much higher real-life resolution than a 6 or 10 Mpix CCD operating behind an anti-liaising filter. No wonder a photographer upgrading from an early dSLR was a bit surprised by the “surgical” nature of the JPEGs.

*Venice, on Dec 25th 2010 – Shot with a Nikon D80 and a Sigma 18-125 lens.* (10 Megapixel CCD Sensor)

So…

The “CCD look” was a JPEG thing.
the “film like” look of images captured with CCDs was the result of lower resolution sensors, thick anti-liaising filters, and above all a product of the JPEG image processing algorithms used at that time.
With modern cameras, “film like” behavior can be emulated to a much higher degree than what the JPEG engines of the cameras of 2005 could do. Film emulation (or Picture Styles or whatever the camera manufacturer calls its brand of JPEG rendering recipe) is not only good at mimicking the tonal response and the colors of film, but also its grain.
Now that every camera maker is proposing some form of “Picture Control” or film simulation to customize the output of their JPEG rendering engine, it’s remarkable that nobody is proposing “CCD emulation”. Maybe it was not so much of an issue after all?
CCD equipped cameras are still available on the second hand market, are generally very cheap, and will give your images the full CCD look if it’s what you’re after.

CCD equipped compact cameras

The compact (point and shoot) cameras of the early days of the digital migration are the ones delivering images closer to the film look, probably because of the low resolution of their image sensor and the very consumer oriented tuning of their JPEG rendering engine. I’m still impressed by the “Barbie at the beach” look of the JPEGs of my old Canon S400 Powershot (Digital Elph or Ixus).

Compact cameras switched from CCD to CMOS sensors later than dSLRs – the last models being launched around 2011.

*Miami Beach in 2004 – Canon Powershot S400* (4 Megapixel CCD Sensor)

CCD sensor equipped dSLRs

With the exception of sensors manufactured by Kodak for the Leica M9 (which had very significant long term reliability issues), there is no Full Frame CCD sensor, and only one APS-C sensor with a resolution higher than 10 Megapixel (a 14 Mpix APS-C sensor only used by Sony on the Alpha 280/380 series, which had a reputation of being no good above 800 ISO).

Because of the technical characteristics of CCDs, there never was a CCD equipped mirrorless camera, or a CCD equipped dSLR offering real Live-View capabilities (the Sony Alpha 350/380/390 used a second, dedicated sensor in its viewfinder to offer Live-View). The last dSLRs equipped with CCD sensors were launched around 2010 (Nikon D3000, Sony Alpha 290 and 390).

Let’s focus on the 10 megapixel cameras from Nikon, Olympus, Pentax and Sony:

Nikon D200, D80, D40X, D60, D3000 – they all share a 10 Megapixel CCD sensor of the same family. The D200 is often considered the best CCD equipped dSLR ever, but it’s a big and heavy camera designed for pros. There is little difference between the D40X, the D60 and the D3000 – all three are entry level dSLRs designed for beginners and amateurs. The D80 sits in-between. A Nikon D80 was my main camera for years, and I’m still impressed by the quality of the pictures I took with it (I love the D80’s JPEGs).
Olympus was the first camera maker to take advantage of CMOS sensors to offer Live View in a limited fashion (on the E330 in 2006). The e400 of the same year is their last dSLR with a CCD sensor (a 10 Megapixel sourced from Kodak). Like the Nikon D200, the e400 has a legion of enthusiastic fans and is comparatively expensive second hand.
Pentax K10D, K200D, K-M, K-2000 – the K10D is the big semi-pro camera, the other models are smaller and more amateur oriented. The 10 Megapixel Pentax dSLRs are generally appreciated for their beautiful RAW files, but reviewers complain about their comparatively poor JPEGs, which may not be great if you’re after the CCD look.
Sony a100, a200 and a300 series – all are the successors of Konica-Minolta 5D. The 100 and 200 series are very conventional amateur oriented models, the models of the 300 series offer Live-View capabilities thanks to a second dedicated image sensor.

Canon is absent from that list. For their line of dSLRs, they made a very early bet on CMOS – I believe that the EOS-1d of 2001 is their only CCD-equipped dSLR. Note that they kept on integrating CCD sensors in their line of digital point and shoot cameras until 2011.

Venice - Nikon FE2 - Fujicolor 400 — *Venice – Nikon FE2 – Fujicolor 400 – Dec. 2010*

The value of cameras on the second hand market tends to be driven primarily by the sensor resolution – and 10 megapixels is considered so low that all the cameras of this list can be bought for less than $150 (the Nikon D200 is the most expensive, the oldest “amateur” models being the cheapest at $50.00 to $70.00). Interestingly, 10 Mpix CCD compact cameras like the Canon G12 or the Nikon P7100 currently sell for more than the best 10 Megapixels dSLRs. Nikon D200 included.

Venice, Dec 2008 – Nikon D80 (CCD Sensor)

Atlanta Aquarium – Canon Powershot S400 (CCD Sensor)

Pentax KP – Quirky grip design – great camera (Part Two)

The Pentax KP – an APS-C Digital SLR competing in the same category as the Nikon D7500 and the Canon 90D – was presented in a recent blog entry. It was sold between 2017 and 2021, and was spec’d to slot between the “amateur” oriented Pentax K-70/KF, and the very expensive Pentax K-3 Mk III.

The K-70/KF and the K-3 have bodies which are very conventional for dSLRs (and make them easy to live with), but the design of the KP is reminiscent of the manual focus SLRs of the eighties (and of the very successful Fujifilm X series mirrorless cameras), which creates some ergonomics and battery life challenges.

Without a direct legacy in the current Pentax line-up, the KP remains a very interesting proposition for Pentax shooters – with a 24 Mpix sensor and a processing engine of recent design, it is still up to date when compared to mid level APS-C mirrorless cameras. In fact, in terms of image quality and high ISO performance, it’s only second to the much more expensive K-3 Mk III in the Pentax APS-C line-up. And contrarily to its K-3 biggest brothers, it has an articulated rear display, which makes composing the image in “Live-View” mode easier.

*High Falls State Park, GA – Pentax KP – Pentax DA 35mm f/2.8 Macro Limited*

Shooting with the KP : the optical viewfinder

Because it’s Pentax’s main differentiator, the optical viewfinder of their dSLRs is the object of the utmost care – and the truth is that – for an APS-C camera, the KP has a very good OVF. The specs sheet reads like a dream come true. The OVF’s pentaprism is made out of glass, it covers almost 100% of the captured image, with a magnification factor of 0.95x and an eye relief of 20.5mm. The focusing screen is fine and bright enough to let you set the focus “manually” with pre-autofocus era lenses.

It’s still an APS-C (meaning cropped sensor) camera, which makes some of the figures of the specs sheet misleading – the announced magnification factor of 0.95x would translate into a relatively mediocre 0.63x on a full frame dSLR (a Pentax K-1 or a Nikon D780 reach 0.7x, and the very best full frame cameras 0.76x). The viewfinder does not exactly give you the immersive view you get in the OVF of a professional full frame dSLR – but composing your pictures through the viewfinder of the KP is still a very pleasant experience – it is large and luminous enough to let you judge how the image will look like without having to double check the rear digital display all the time – it’s very significant step up over the “dark tunnel vision” experienced with the entry-level dSLRs from some other manufacturers.

There is no electronics to introduce a delay between what happens on the scene and what you see on the focusing screen, and – for whatever reason (I know, old habits and old age…), I find it easier to mentally project the final image when I compose on the focusing screen of an optical viewfinder rather than on the LCD panel of an electronic viewfinder.

Shooting with the KP: The third control wheel

Like cars, cameras are software defined those days. Everything can be configured and menus have become incredibly long and complex. The KP is not different, but Pentax has introduced one trick to make the photographer’s life easier, the “third control wheel”.

On a relatively compact camera like the KP, the real estate where to place dedicated buttons and switches is limited, and the quantity of options and settings offered in the menus can be overwhelming.

There are settings for which no dedicated physical control is available but that you may wish to change without having to dig deep into pages and pages menus. That’s where the third control wheel – the so called “smart function dial” comes into play.

The “smart function dial” is a big knob on the top plate that can take one of six positions – three pre-defined by Pentax, and three user-defined. Imagine you’re in front of a high contrast scene – you know you’re going to need to set the camera to HDR mode, but don’t know how to configure it. Place the big dial on the HDR position, and rotate the third control wheel at the far right of the top plate to select the desired HDR setting. Take the picture, review the result, then simply rotate the third control wheel left of right to select another HDR setting, and repeat until you get a picture you like.

*The “smart function dial” with its “AE-HDR-CH/CL…” markings is paired with the unmarked control wheel on its right. A very good idea, nicely implemented.*

In my experience, the real value sits with the user configurable functions, C1, C2 and C3. I’ve set C1 to change the exposure compensation value. If I’m facing a scene difficult to evaluate, I position the knob on C1, and use the third wheel to circle through the different exposure compensation values. Similarly, I configured C2 to easily switch from an ISO value to another.

The third control wheel may seem gimmicky, or redundant (I could also access the exposure compensation or the ISO settings using a dedicated key and the second control wheel or the Info page on the rear display), but it saves time if you need to change a parameter frequently or if you’re trying different options when facing a complex scene, and I ended up using it a lot.

Not so good: Battery life

Well, it’s not brilliant. Not as bad as a Fujifilm X-H1, for instance, but not great at all, and frankly disappointing for a dSLR. Because there was no room in the KP’s body for the large battery of the K-5/K-3 series, Pentax used the small 1050 mAh battery introduced in 2010 with the K-r, and typically coming with Pentax’s entry level models (it’s still being used in the KF). For reference, the K-5 and the K-3 use a 1860 mAh battery, delivering almost twice the capacity.

The KP is begging to be used in Live View Mode (why would Pentax have specified a tiltable rear screen otherwise), which increases the power consumption and makes the choice of a small battery even more puzzling. When Nikon dSLRs can easily shoot 1000 pictures on a charge, the KP is struggling to deliver more than three hundreds (it’s rated at 420 shots per charge by CIPA, which seems pretty optimistic). Be sure to have one or two charged spare batteries with you, or the battery grip attached.

The battery grip accepts one lithium battery (either the small type of the KP/KF or the large type of the K-5/K-3) and its capacity comes in addition to the battery already in place in the body of the camera, effectively doubling the total battery capacity (with the small KP/KF battery) or almost tripling it (with the large K-5/K-3 battery).

*Apart from the KP, only the full frame Pentax K-1 has a tillable rear display – it tilts forward….*

The Live View mode and macro-photography

This is not a mirrorless camera, and even though the image sensor has photosites dedicated to phase detection autofocus, they are only mobilized when shooting videos, and not when taking still images.

Therefore, when in the Live-View mode, the KP won’t have the speed and reactivity of a good mirrorless ILC (to shoot sports, wild life or other moving subjects, use the optical viewfinder, that’s what it’s here for). But on relatively static and evenly lit subjects (landscape, interior photography, macro photography), the autofocus of the Live View mode works extremely well.

On other subjects (moving objects or people, scenes with strong highlights), it struggles, and hunts vainly for focus (I’ve read it performs better with recent lenses equipped with an internal focusing motor). On earlier Pentax models, Live-View looked like a clunky afterthought. Here, it’s well implemented but only usable with a limited type of subjects.

Image Quality

I don’t know if it’s the camera, or the prime Pentax 35mm Macro “Limited” prime lens . Or the combination they form. But I’ve been really pleased and genuinely impressed with the quality of the images.

The images (RAW and JPEGs) are correctly exposed, with pleasing colors, they show an impressive dynamic range, and need very few adjustments – no need to play with the exposure, the highlights or the clarity sliders to get pictures you can be proud of. And it’s true for landscapes, for interiors, for pictures of objects, when composing through the optical viewfinder and on the rear display in Live-View mode.

You can see Pentax dSLRs as obsolete pieces of machinery, and you would have a point when it comes to their live-view or video capabilities, but as far as still image quality is concerned, they’re perfectly up to date.

*“Only time will tell” – on the trail markers of the Sweetwater Creek Park (GA), interesting messages are often written by visitors. I saw this one long after the picture was taken.*

A mirrorless killer?

No way.

The KP is a niche product. You shoot with a KP either because you’re a committed Pentax dSLR photographer and will not consider any other camera system, or because from time to time you want to enjoy to experience of composing your images through an optical viewfinder, with a camera whose user interface you can configure in depth and to your liking.

Objectively, compared to the best mirrorless ILCs, the KP’s autofocus is not as capable (it only offers face detection in live view, for instance, not when composing through the optical viewfinder), the autofocus in the live-view mode only works well with relatively static and evenly lit subjects, video capture is comparatively primitive and most surprisingly for a dSLR, battery life is sub-par (recent mirrorless cameras do better). As for the ergonomics, it’s an acquired taste – the KP is extremely compact (smaller than a Fujifilm X-T series for instance), but also heavier and not as pleasant to hold if paired with its small grip.

Image quality is extremely good and pictures have a pleasant “Pentax Touch”, but the best mirrorless cameras are no slouch either, and nowadays a lot can be accomplished with presets and filters in image editing software. Last by not least, the vendors of APS-C mirrorless cameras – Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon or Sony – all have a significant market presence and a clear product roadmap, which can’t be said for Pentax.

So, what’s left? The thing that mirrorless cameras can’t offer: the direct, immediate view of the scene through an optical viewfinder. That, and the fact that the user interface is so rich in buttons, knobs and control wheels that the camera can be configured to work exactly like you feel it should. The KP is a genuine pleasure to shoot with and naturally pushes the photographer to explore and experiment.

Except to pay between $550.00 and $750.00 for a used KP located in the US. Pentax cameras used to have a much stronger following in Japan than in America, and most of the used KPs are located there. They will be subject to tariffs and fees if imported into the US. Tariffs and fees may (or may not) be included in the announced shipping costs. It’s a point to validate before placing the order.

More about the KP:

DPReview: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentax-kp-review
Pentaxforums: https://www.pentaxforums.com/reviews/pentax-kp-review/introduction.html
PentaxUser: https://www.pentaxuser.com/review/pentax-kp-dslr-review-1038
Kobie MC on Youtube: https://youtu.be/N5fAc45_UdE?si=iMBC23n53vBdcwA9

For a similar budget, should you buy a used K-3 Mk II or a used KP?

The KP is a more modern but somehow quirky evolution of the K-3 Mk II. Its image sensor is more recent, its image processing engine more elaborate, and it will deliver marginally nicer pictures, particularly at high ISOs. The third control wheel is also unique to the KP, and more useful than I thought.

The tiltable rear screen is in my opinion the main reason to prefer a KP over a K-3 II. It makes the camera easier to use for macro photography, when shooting with a wide angle lens or from the hip in the street, all situations where the live-view option can be put to better use with a tiltable LCD. Alternatively, its more conventional design is the main reason to prefer a K-3 Mk II, in particular if you shoot with long and heavy lenses, and believe that the tiltable rear screen is going to make the KP too fragile in the long run.

K-3 Mk II or KP, it’s up to you – but be warned: it may whet your appetite for an even more modern take on the classic Pentax optical viewfinder camera theme, the K-3 Mk III.

Pentax KP – Quirky grip design – great camera (Part One)

Only Canon, Nikon and Pentax still have dSLRs in their product catalogs, but although they’re still on the shelves of the retailers, I don’t know if any of those dSLRs is still being manufactured.

Pentax is committed to the dSLR architecture, and with the full frame K-1 Mk II, and no less than three cropped sensor models, the KF, the K-3 Mk III and the K-3 Monochrome, they have the youngest dSLR model range of the remaining big three (all four Pentax models were launched between 2018 and 2023).

Between the predecessor of the current KF (the K-70) and a then to come K-3 Mk III, Pentax thought there was room for an intermediate model, the KP, a technical evolution of the K-3 Mk II, but with a totally different design.

*Pentax KP (left) and K-5 (right).* *A very different ergonomic study* *(this KP is shown with the “small” removable grip).*

Launched in 2017 and retired in 2021, the KP begged to be different – from its Pentax siblings and from Canon & Nikon’ remaining dSLRs.

The KP was designed as a sort of mini K-1, with the aim of looking physically smaller than the K-3, but be more configurable and more solidly built than the entry level K-70. Its styling was reminiscent of the manual focus, non motorized cameras of the nineteen seventies, with a slim body and a shutter release button placed in the middle of the top plate.

Equipped with a newer generation 24 Mpix sensor, the KP retained the autofocus module of the “pro” K-3 Mk II. Like it, it could be fitted with an optional battery grip. It inherited the image processing engine of the K-1, and improved on its full frame brother with a more flexible configuration for its third control wheel.

Beyond the style, the KP’s main differentiation point with the K-70 and the K-3 Mk II was the ability for the photographer to choose between 3 sizes of hand grips.

The design of those interchangeable hand grips is somehow controversial. Professional reviewers like Chris Nichols of DPReview and Petapixel fame positively hated it. Among the Pentax photographers, some like it, some shoot with a KP in spite of it, and some remained true to the K-3 Mk II because of it.

*Trying to hold the KP firmly with one hand – a rather uncomfortable way to use this camera*

The small grip was supposed to be mounted on the KP when the photographer was shooting with small (and light) primes, the large grip (and the battery grip) when shooting with a long and heavy tele-lens or tele-zoom, and the medium one the rest of time.

In the American market, the camera was packaged with the three hand grips initially, but after a while Pentax only included the small grip in the base configuration, the large one being part of an extra cost bundle also including a battery grip, and the medium sized one being sold separately for $49.99. None of those grips is available now, and my KP will be stuck with its small grip for the time being.

*Pentax KP next to a Fujifilm X-T4 – counter-intuitively, the mirrorless camera is larger than the dSLR, and offers a significantly longer battery life.*

The Pentax KP is not the only camera with a retro-inspired, small grip design – look no further than the very successful Fujifilm X series, but what works very well on a X-100 or a X-T4 does not click on the KP.

First impressions – is the grip worth the buzz?

Pentax APS-C cameras tend to be small, and the KP looks even smaller than its siblings. But it’s not its compact size that strikes you the most when you bring the viewfinder of the camera to your eye for the first time, it’s its weight. It’s not really heavier than a Pentax K-5 or K-3 (all tip the scales at approximately 700 g), but its compact design and its small grip make its weight much more noticeable.

*Pentax K-5 – you can hold it with one hand with confidence*, *and even adjust some settings with the rear control wheel.*

On a K-5 or a K-3 (and on other dSLRs of more conventional design), the camera can be held firmly with the palm of the right hand and the three lower fingers, leaving the thumb and the index free to move and reach the different control wheels and commands. You can be confident that you won’t drop the camera while you’re moving around your subject, looking for the right angle.

If you try and hold the KP with one hand, you have to pinch the right side of the camera between your thumb and three of your remaining fingers (no room for the pinky). Even with a prime lens or a light zoom, we’re talking about two pounds of glass and metal here, that you will be afraid to drop if your fingers start releasing their grip (it’s not a coincidence that the previous owner of this camera had included a wrist strap in the package I received).

*How the KP has to be operated if equipped with the small grip – held firmly in the palm in the left hand, right hand thumb and index on the controls.*

With the small grip in place, the KP definitely requires a two-hand operation.

Solutions to the hand grip challenge

The design, the ergonomics and the small grip of the KP may work for you. Personally I would have liked the camera to be more conducive to one hand operations, and I believe that the slim design of the KP would have worked better if the camera had been one or two hundred grams lighter and its body just a bit taller.

The simplest way for me to address my “grip problem” would be to buy the OEM large grip (Pentax reference O-GP1672). Based on the input of other KP users, it should make “one hand operations” easier. If only I could locate one.

Pentax KP with the Battery Grip – the battery grip is designed to be paired with the large hand grip – but even with the small hand grip still in place, it makes the camera much more comfortable to hold.

The camera I bought came with the optional Pentax D-BG7 battery grip (but without the large hand grip, unfortunately). I’m not a fan of battery grips in general because they make the camera bulkier and often require to remove the battery door, but in the case of the KP, the battery door (and the OEM battery) remain in place, and the grip addresses two of the KP’s glaring issues – the battery life and the ergonomics, without much of a weight penalty (300g approx).

With the battery grip in place, the battery capacity of the camera almost triples: the 1050 mAh battery remains in the body of the camera, and only starts being drained when the battery located in the grip is depleted (the grip accepts the same 1050 mAh battery as the camera does, or the larger 1860 mAh battery of the Pentax K-5/K-3 series).

As for the ergonomics, the battery grip is a huge improvement. It’s supposed to help with vertical composition, but even when composing an horizontal image it makes the camera much easier to hold and control : I’m not afraid to grab it with one hand anymore, and although the front control wheel remains difficult to access, the one at the back of the body is easily reached.

A last option is to do for the KP what I did for my other “slim bodied” cameras (the Fujifilm X series and Sony HX-60): I ordered a Leather Half Case from a non specified Chinese vendor on AliExpress. Those half cases add almost a centimeter of leather under the bottom plate, they also make the front of the camera’s body a bit thicker and increase the surface presented to the fingers, making the camera much easier to hold.

*One of the many online stores selling KP half cases.*

I picked the black one (it’s also available in fancier colors). This half case is well finished, and makes the KP much more comfortable to hold. A few millimeters here and there can do a lot. I can even reach the rear control wheel while holding the camera firmly in the palm of my right hand. A definitive improvement, and a permanent fixture on my camera now.

*The leather half case makes the KP much easier to work with.*

Shooting with the Pentax KP

Now that I’ve described in length my two major gripes with the KP, it’s time to discuss the positives. Optical viewfinder, abundance of physical controls, configurability, and of course, image quality. It’s a very pleasant camera to use, that begs to be taken to a photo stroll, and will reward you with great pictures. More about the Pentax KP in the next blog post, in two weeks.

More recent content in CamerAgX

Georgia pictures from my Flickr Album

*Cartersville, GA – home of the first Coca-Cola wall advertisement (1894). Restored in 1989. Pentax KP – Pentax DA Limited 35mm f/2.8 macro*

*Cartersville, GA – Pentax KP – Pentax DA Limited 35mm f/2.8 macro*

*Cartersville, GA – one of the many restaurants painted in Coca-Cola colors. Pentax KP. Pentax DA Limited 35mm F/2.8*

*Cartersville, GA – another Coca-Cola Red restaurant. Still standing. Pentax KP. Pentax DA Limited 35mm F/2.8* macro.

*Cartersville, GA – the 4 Way Lunch restaurant – Detail – Pentax KP – Pentax DA Limited 35mm F/2.8*

A backup strategy for the images you edit in Lightroom Creative Cloud

My big 2025 photography project was to move all my pictures out of my hardware dependent local storage, and migrate them to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I knew I would not convert my Lightroom 6 catalogs (theoretically possible, but too cumbersome), but the folders on the Network Attached Storage device (NAS) where the originals were stored had always been carefully organized. I thought I would not lose much by not converting the catalogs. I subscribed to Adobe’s Lightroom Creative Cloud (first through the Apple Store, later directly on the Adobe Store), and uploaded all the original images, folder by folder, to Lightroom. The process was described in detail is a series of blog entries dedicated to Lightroom.

Which means I’m now trusting Adobe for preserving 28 years of scanned negatives and digital images in their cloud. What can possibly go wrong?

A recent post by Jim Grey (about “the lost photos era”) and interactions I’ve had with cloud service providers in a professional context brought back to my attention that storing my images in a cloud was a good first step but not enough.

*Rome – Fontana de Nettuno – Piazza Navona. Nikon D80 – Jan 2010*

The “shared responsibility model”

All cloud service providers (CSPs) operate under a shared responsibility model. It’s the CSP’s job to ensure that their technical platform remains available and secure, and that the data entrusted to them can be recovered in case of a disaster in their data centers. As the client, it’s your responsibility to “govern your content”: manage the uploads, the regular cleanups, and configure how the data is accessed and shared.

The grey area is of course backup – CSPs generally commit to recovering your data at Day Minus One if something really bad happens to their infrastructure, but they won’t be obligated to do anything if you deleted a folder by mistake, or if you wanted to recover a group of files as they were at a specific point in time. CSPs generally consider that backups and restores are the responsibility of the client.

Although Adobe is a reliable company, I know I have to protect my images from a catastrophic error on their part, and from a major mistake (fat finger?) on mine.

A reminder – the differences between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Classic

Adobe Lightroom Classic is the current iteration of Adobe’s original image edit and management software, launched in 2007 as Lightroom 1.0.

It’s a “fat client” application designed to work on Windows or MacOS workstations (desktop or laptop), which stores your images locally (on the hard drive of your workstation or on some form of higher capacity local storage, DAS or NAS). Lightroom maintains at least one local catalog of your images, which contains all the ratings, flags, titles, captions you have entered, as well as a log of all the edits and setting changes (crops, exposure, color balance, sharpening,…) performed on the images.

The system is totally self contained – but as everything (catalog, images and edits) is kept locally, it’s your responsibility to manage the storage, the backup and the disaster recovery of your images.

Under the same Lightroom brand, Adobe is selling a totally different range of cloud based products simply named Lightroom or Lightroom CC, whose lightweight clients run on a smartphone (iOS or Android), a tablet (iPadOS or Android) and on a desktop or laptop (Windows or MacOS). All those products share the same on-line library (hosted on Adobe’s Creative Cloud).

Contrarily to Lightroom Classic, the Creative Cloud versions of Lightroom (smartphone, tablet, PC or Mac) don’t keep any image or catalog on your device – just a cache to reduce the response time. The whole system works very well: I can upload images from my camera through a smartphone while traveling, perform light edits on a tablet at the hotel the same day, and spend more time perfecting the images on a laptop when I’m back home – it’s seamless. As long as I keep paying for the subscription, of course. And bar a catastrophic event in Creative Cloud.

Backup workflows don’t live forever

Even if the image formats themselves (jPEG and DNG) have been remarkably stable over the last 20 years, the hardware, the software and the cloud services offerings have not stopped evolving – and what used to work reliably ten years ago does not work any more. Which means that every now and then, we need to take a hard look at our workflow and re-engineer it.

When I put it in place in 2018, my image preservation workflow made sense – I was using Adobe Lightroom 6 running on a Mac to edit my photos and manage my libraries. Lightroom 6 was keeping the catalog on the local hard drive of my Macbook and was pointing to a volume on the Netgear NAS to store the images themselves. I was also running a backup application named Arq on the Macbook, and using it to keep a backup of the NAS in Amazon’s long term storage, AWS Glacier.

Along the years, this finely tuned workflow crumbled.

First, the OS of my old MacBook stopped being supported, and I saw its capabilities decline progressively as it could not access the services that Apple (and others) kept on making more secure with more refined security protocols and longer encryption keys.

To make the matter worse, Netgear decided to get out of the network storage business – my RN214 NAS still works, but is not supported and (of course) its OS and its built-in backup apps are not updated anymore.

Last but not least, AWS has now sunset Glacier as I was using it – it’s not a stand alone product anymore, just a storage class in the S3 product portfolio, using different APIs.

My storage and backup strategy was crumbling and I had to act. That’s why I migrated the libraries themselves to Adobe’s Creative Cloud last year, and why I’m now implementing a new backup and restore workflow now.

My new workflow – saving the “digital negatives“

As often nowadays, I called ChatGPT for help. The workflow it recommended, and that I implemented, is still based on Adobe Creative Cloud being my primary image store, the “source of truth”. Lightroom (the PC/Mac edition of Lightroom) on my MacBook will act as a sort of gateway to the NAS, and the NAS volume will store my local replica of the originals stored in Creative Cloud.

It’s important to remember that for Lightroom, a local storage volume is nothing more than the place where it stores a local cache. What is being replicated to the local volume is the source image – the original JPEG or raw files exactly as they were originally uploaded from the camera – before any transformation, optimization or edit was performed. The images are grouped on the SAN by date (one folder per year, one subfolder per day) and the album structure you defined in Lightroom is not respected. Again, it’s a cache that we use as a way to backup our source images, not a backup of the final images after Lightroom has processed them.

The local cache on the SAN shows the original files grouped by date of capture – the Lightroom Album structure and the edits are not preserved, only the original image itself (compare with the structure of April 2016 in Lightroom, as shown below).

*Lightroom CC – the folder/album structure (here, April 2016)*. *In Lightroom the images are grouped in user defined folders and albums*.

How to setup Adobe Lightroom

Once the Mac is logged in the Network Attached Storage volume, simply click on the “Adobe Lightroom” option at the top left of the screen, select “Cache”, and under Performance, check the “Store a copy of all originals option”, and point to the folder of the NAS where the original images will be dropped.

The sync process is managed automatically by Lightroom. Every time you add new pictures to Lightroom, it will start replicating them to the SAN.

If you’re working with Lightroom away from your home network, no problem. Adobe will consider that the cache is not available, and will download the images from the cloud.

*In Lightroom CC – check the “Store a copy of all originals” option and point to the NAS as a the local storage*

Creating an off-site backup of the Network Attached Storage volume

The primary storage location of my images is Adobe Creative Cloud. I keep a replica of the originals on a network attached storage device (NAS) at home. It’s a pretty solid data protection system, but it’s only keeping one replica of Creative Cloud’s originals – and a replica is not a backup (because it only keeps the most recent version of a file). It is not very complicated or expensive to make it even more robust, and create an off site backup of the original images.

*Duplicati – the backup job (it took it 12 hours to backup 110 Gbytes of pictures – not bad at all).*

That’s what I used to do with Amazon Glacier – and having an off site backup of my photo library was a saving grace when my first Netgear NAS device gave up the ghost. Restoring the images from Glacier took a week, but it’s better than losing everything.

*The target Google Drive after the backup – the data is grouped in blocks of 50 Mbytes*.

This time, I tried different options (Arq, Backblaze) which for various reasons (performance, cost, no support of network attached devices) did not work for me. My current setup is based on an open source software named Duplicati, which is pushing the Lightroom replica on the NAS to a Google Drive. It works, backups are reasonably fast (around 2.5 Mbytes/sec), and it’s flexible enough: I can recover a specific image in a few minutes if I need to.

Validating that the setup works

Backup and restore workflows are fragile, and they can fail for all sorts of reasons (expired passwords or keys, OS or software upgrade, hardware or network related issues, human error). And it’s not because the backup is successful that the restore will be.

*Restoring the data – selecting the document to restore is easy and the restore takes no more than a few minutes.*

I had to validate that, with the Mac and Lightroom CC up and running, and the NAS volume mounted, that:

any new image added to the Lightroom CC library was replicated to the SAN, in its original state,
the backup software would catch the new image and back it up to the Google drive,
and that I could restore any image or any group of images as needed.

The tests were successful.

Saving the final images

You may also want to preserve a copy of the final state of your images, after Lightroom has applied all of its edits.

The challenge of course is that in Lightroom, the images don’t really have a final state. Adobe keeps your original photo and a sort of log of the transformations you performed, and dynamically creates a file containing the image you want after you have requested an export. You pick the quality, the dimensions, and the file format (small JPEG, large JPEG, PNG, TIFF, DNG, …) with or without sharpening – depending on what you intend to do with the image (email attachment, social media, photo gallery, photo album, print, …). And the image you need is created on the fly.

*Lightroom – so many ways to export a photo*

I understand that a professional photographer delivering images to many clients may want to keep a trace of what was delivered, and have an archival system specifically tuned to preserve them. (And pros may prefer working Adobe Lightroom Classic, anyway).

I’m not in this situation and I’ve never really given much thought about it. I simply export the images I need to the same shared folder in Apple’s iCloud, that all my Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) can access.

Final words

In the days of film, it was not easy (or cheap) for amateur photographers to create duplicates of their color slides or their negatives, and store them in a second location as a backup. Photographers were at the mercy of fire, floods and burglaries, and could lose the images of a lifetime in a few minutes.

Digital images can be easily duplicated, and the duplicates stored in totally different locations, on totally different media. The setup described here is very easy to implement: a NAS is not even needed (the local SSD of a PC or a Mac would work as well), and many of our subscriptions (Microsoft Office Family for instance) already include 1 TB of storage and could be used as backup target.

More about Lightroom and fifty five camera reviews:

All the images of this series were shot in Rome, in April 2009 and in January 2010, with a Nikon D80. They were saved as originals on multiple generations of storage, recovered from a catastrophic NAS failure, and imported in Adobe’s Creative Cloud last year. I just adjusted a few sliders before exporting them to WordPress.

CamerAgX – a new life for old gear

Gear

A few words about the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome

Pentax 17: a compact film camera like no other

The $7.00, Five Below Reusable Photo camera and its $7.00 film cartridge

The never ending story of the Pentax KP’s interchangeable hand grip

Carrying all that gear – three sizes of camera bags

The scene I’m facing and the image I see in my head

The last dSLRs with CCD sensors

Pentax KP – Quirky grip design – great camera (Part Two)

Pentax KP – Quirky grip design – great camera (Part One)

A backup strategy for the images you edit in Lightroom Creative Cloud