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First Look at Pentax's 645D Digital Medium Format Camera
By Michael Topham
Techniques
11 November 2010 12:35
At the time of writing it was a week ago that we took delivery of Pentax’s latest D-SLR to date – the Medium Format 645D. Requested into the office for four days for review purposes on both Digital Photo and Practical Photography magazines, there’s been a reasonable amount of hype about this 40Mp camera ever since it was launched into the Japanese market, six months or so ago.
We had suspicions that the 645D might arrive in the UK before the end of 2010 following our invitation to travel to Paris with Pentax for a Medium Format camera show back in June. With the 645D on show, we were privileged to be among the first of UK press to get hands on the camera and we were already starting to look forward to the day it would arrive at our offices, to test it in anger and give it a proper run out.
The full reviews on the 645D will come in the Christmas issues of Digital Photo and Practical Photography, but for now we thought you like to read up on our first impressions and look at some of the tests shots produced by the 40Mp sensor.
After spending Friday evening with the 645D to get familiar with the controls, menu system and layout, I felt pretty confident going into Saturday morning’s shoot that everything about the camera had been learnt. I had decided early on that I was going to shoot wide-open (f/2.8 on Pentax’s new D-FA 55mm AL [IF] SDM lens) for a majority of the day to help isolate my model from the trees and the complex surroundings of the golf course. This turned out to be a great test of the 645D’s 11-point AF system. AF speed was quick and responsive but the central positioning of the AF points made it difficult to focus on the model’s eyes when she was positioned off centre in the frame. To combat this I soon got into the habit of using the central AF point to lock focus on the eyes, switching from AF to MF and then framing up the model where I’d envisaged her in the frame. In hindsight we’d preferred it if the 645’s AF points were more spread out, rather than being clumped together centrally in the middle.
Another point that I picked up on was the 4-5 second delay before an image could be reviewed on the 3in, 920k-dot LCD. At the start of the shoot this wasn’t too much of a problem as the golf course was virtually empty and I had time to work at leisure, but later on when I had to work more quickly, this delay became slightly more irritating. Being a great believer in checking the histogram and the exposure, it would have been good to see the 645D writing RAW files to the 16GB SD card quicker than it did. (Write speeds will be commented on in the magazine reviews).
My intension was to use the 645D with off camera flash for the shoot. This idea never really took off however as the wireless Seculine Twin Link triggers weren’t compatible with the 645D, but did strangely enough fire the two speedlite flash guns in Aperture Priority mode. Natural light and a gold Lastolite reflector were relied on instead.
Although the 645D is weighty (1480g, with the battery and two SD cards loaded) it does have a superb feel in the hand. The large handgrip allows you to get a really good grasp and even after carrying it around for the best part of a morning it didn’t feel too unwieldy or overly cumbersome. Most shots during the day were taken from a locked off position on a tripod with the self-timer set to 10secs. This gave me the few seconds I needed to get in position with the reflector to bounce back some natural warmth onto the model’s face.
After a long day I looked forward to getting home to the iMac to find out how the 645D had performed in terms of its image quality. A quick check of the camera’s battery indicator revealed I’d only used one bar of power – not bad considering it had been constantly from 9am-2pm. The SD card that I used to record all the images from the shoot in RAW (DNG) format was taken out and popped into the card reader. I soon discovered I’d taken 156 images, which worked out at 8.31GB’s worth of RAW files. If this were my day in day out camera I’d definitely be looking to invest in some more storage! Opening a few of the files into Adobe Camera RAW and hitting the shortcut Ctrl + revealed that the 40Mp sensor had recorded superb levels of detail.
For all of you who are keen to see, we’ve got a few example shots from the shoot shown on this page, combined with some detailed views at 100%.
If you want to read up more about the 645D don’t miss Digital Photo’s and Practical Photography’s Christmas issues, out at the beginning of December.