Page 16 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #4
P. 16
for shutter speed. lenging given both the design of the applica-
To the left of the auto focus button on tion and its terminology. It is also clear that
the back, there is a green button. This allows the developers did not have a good command
you to change modes without changing the dial of English either so some of the terms are nei-
on top of the camera. I could switch from fully ther intuitive nor close to proper English. We
manual to aperture priority almost instantly. don't fault Ricoh for that.
There are two slots for SD cards in the Is this a camera you should consider
camera body. We regularly worked with two 16 purchasing? Yes. Without a doubt.
Gig Hoodman SD cards. There are many dif- Consider this: If you are thinking of
ferent options: Images can be written two one purchasing a Canon 1Dx or the top of the line
and then to the other when the first card is full, Nikon, the "street price" is about $6,500 for
to bot cards at the same time, or raw to one and either one. This is the same as the 645D. The
JPG to the other. We were surprised that there 645D has a much larger sensor and even the
were two SD cards since they are considerably best of the DSLRs can't match its image quali-
slower than compact flash. Still, we were able ty.
to take seven photos before we filled the buffer The 645D doesn't have as many lenses
in the camera. Previewing images was slower as Canon or Nikon have, however, the lenses
than we expected largely because the camera that are available are more than adequate for
uses SD cards. virtually every application. In fact, used Pen-
As you can imagine, the raw images are tax lenses are very reasonably priced. Third
large - about 50 MB each - more than three party lenses are also available.
times the average of our 22 MP 1Ds Mark III. It will be interesting to see what the
Two raw formats are available - DNG and na- future of the 645D will be. As we noted, the
tive Pentax. We recommend using the DNG sensor was manufactured by Kodak. We were
format. unable to determine who - if any one - is now
There was only one issue with which we making that sensor. Also, given the relatively
struggled. The 645D isn't supported by DxO recent acquisition of Pentax by Ricoh, we don't
Lab's Optics Pro so we had to find another way know when the 645D will be refreshed. In our
to convert the raw images. We found Adobe's opinion, none of these concerns are significant
Camera Raw unacceptable. Capture One was enough to keep us from strongly recommend-
better. In the end, we settled for the full ver- ing this camera.
sion of Sylkypix. That proved singularly chal-
16 | 645D
