TonyB65
Member
There are times when a "point & shoot"/compact camera are just nice to use, and doing some research on the sort of point and shoot I'd like to try I stumbled upon an excellent camera that I'd never heard of. I was actually researching the Pentax zoom 70 range, which apparently was the first point and shoot zoom camera ever produced. If you're not familiar with them they are fairly large, but pretty robust and capable cameras. As I was browsing some old reviews of the Pentax 70 one reviewer mentioned the Pentax 280-P, and some of it's features. This piqued my interest so I did the usual searches on this camera. To my surprise there is a veritable dearth of information about it, it's almost like it never existed, at least on the internet, even a search on Flickr only returned a single page of images, and a single youtube video on dismantling one (In Thailand). Anyway, I did a search on ebay, not a lot on there either, though I did eventually spot one, in the UK, in very good condition, with a manual, so I bought it for the princely sum of £10.50.
It duly arrived, as described, in excellent condition, fully working, and what a revelation this camera is in terms of features. I'll just summarise some of the great features it, and it has one of real killer:
So, that's my find in the point & shoot world, do you know of any hidden gems, which don't break the bank, with killer features?
It duly arrived, as described, in excellent condition, fully working, and what a revelation this camera is in terms of features. I'll just summarise some of the great features it, and it has one of real killer:
- 28-80mm F3.5-F8 lens with 10 elements in 8 groups, not many point and shoots of this era go to 28mm
- Stepped zooming with focal length indicator on the LCD
- Pretty decent viewfinder, certainly much better than the Canon Powershot's, with a dioptre adjustment.
- Removable remote control built into the camera itself.
- Very well made (In Japan)
- 3 second flash recycle time
- Interval shooting - 10 secs to 60mins
- Bulb shooting down to 10 minutes!
- Multi-exposure, which can do more than two shots
- ISO 25-3200
- Multiple flash options including red-eye, slow sync etc.
- Infinity focus setting
- Exposure compensation +/- 3 in 0.5 steps, which stays activated even after power off, which means you can overcome DX coding and push or pull a film 3 stops either way, for DX coded compact cameras this is almost unheard of, I haven't identified any other P&S of this type that can do this.
- Not as dainty as some, 400g in weight, not going to win a beauty contest.
- Disable flash takes two button presses, not saved after power off, however flash will only fire when light is not sufficient and will warn you with a flashing light by the viewfinder.
So, that's my find in the point & shoot world, do you know of any hidden gems, which don't break the bank, with killer features?