More AA Powered Goodness! Not news to anyone who reads dpreview more frequently than I do, but Pentax has come out with the first digital SLR I'm interested in, called the K100 (and its stupider cousin, the K110, also covered by same link -- the K110D omits image stabilization) and I hope it's just the start of a long trend. 


Lots of photographers have incredible stories about the durability and reliability of their K1000s; I'm not a photographer except for fun, but I found the same. The K1000 I bought* at age 16 or 17 at one of the jillions of used camera stores in New York (17th Street Photo, I think) lasted more than a decade before my father managed to defeat it by pitting my camera in battle against the trunk of my Saab. That does not make it a wimpy camera, merely one that exists in reality. I certainly managed to wound it before that last confrontation by taking it all over the place with no maintenance and little padding, but it kept shooting pictures, had a great light meter, etc. So I dig those stories about K1000s surviving *actual* battlezones. 


The K100 is smallish (for an SLR not based on the newish 4/3 format or other newfangledness), and if it's like the horribly-named *ist series of Pentax SLRs, has a great feel for my hands. The name is obvious but a long-overdue marketing move from Pentax -- I'm surprised that they didn't just call it the K1000D, or the D1000, the K`or even just the K1000 per se. After all, even the film-based K1000 like mine went through various technical improvements -- going digital would be the obvious one for a 21st century successor. 


The resolution is only so-so by current SLR specs (6.something megapixels), but it takes all Pentax lenses, near enough, and is powered by AA batteries. Now I wish I didn't get rid of the nice bright Pentax lens I finally bought when I briefly thought I was a photojournalism major. Sure, a few more megapixels would be nice, but I liked my 1.3MP (Fuji) Leica digilux and 3.1MP CoolPix 990, and my current 4MP Fuji and 7MP Casio, so for my purposes I'd be happier with the sanity in battery choice than I would be disappointed by the limited resolution. (The Leica had an expensive and short-lived proprietary battery, naturally, and even the 3d party replacements were $40 each. Other than that I really liked it quite a bit -- great shape, lens that seemed brighter than its actual rating, smart controls.) 




(quality rating "8" I think, later realized it was optimistic)
