Pentax K20D Review

The Pentax K20D could be seen as a K10D Mk2, a camera that attempts to move on while putting right the minor flaws in its predecessor. And in that respect, it's a huge success. The K20D builds on the strengths of its forebear and corrects for the issue that plagued us most. It offers a great on-paper specification that is backed-up by a level of customization that allow you to tailor the camera to the way you want to shoot.

There are a couple of black marks against it, which should direct photographers with specific needs away to look at more specialized models. The live view mode is neither as seamless as Sony's implementation nor as useful for tripod-based work as Olympus's and consequently feels like a feature that has been added purely to make the camera more marketable. But, before deciding whether this puts you off, it's worth thinking hard about what you'd use it for. Likewise, the continuous shooting rate looks pedestrian by contemporary standards, so sports shooters should look elsewhere.

The autofocus, while never breathtakingly fast, is also never intrusively slow for general shooting. Using enthusiast-level lenses (16-45mm f/4 or 35mm f/2.8 Macro), its performance, even in low light, has been at least comparable with similarly-priced cameras, if not quite up to the standards of the more expensive, similarly-specified cameras from other brands.

The Samsung co-developed sensor may well prove to be a turning point for Pentax, giving the company a little more control over sensors it uses and, in general terms, it delivers high resolution images with noise levels that are comparable with its competitors (and presented with a commendably hands-off approach to noise reduction that allows the user to decide how they wish to deal with noise, rather than smearing it all away). However, the hot pixel problems, combined with the sample-to-sample variability (in this instance ISO 3200 banding), represent the sorts of problems we haven't seen in DSLRs launched in the past few years. Which makes us wonder whether Samsung has over-reached itself with such an ambitious design. This is reflected in our image quality score that without these niggles would have been even higher.


Richard Butler

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