*ist been good
Back in Inbox in AP 17 November 2018, Nigel Atherton invited readers to write in about their favourite old digital camera, and in my case that has to be my 6MP Pentax * ist DL, which I bought new in 2006 after it received favourable reviews in AP. Yes the camera has a silly name, but in the 12 years that have passed by since I bought it I have used it on a regular basis. This is because it just does a darned good job, producing sharp, well-exposed images time after time, possibly helped by the fact that the Pentax 18-55 zoom lens, which I use on the camera most of the time, is one of the better ones. Despite owning a newer DSLR with more than double the number of megapixels, the Pentax is often my ‘go-to’ camera if I am off out for a walk, as it is small and light (body only, it is 100g lighter than a Panasonic G9, for example), so I haven’t got a big heavy lump hanging round my neck. Being powered by readily available AA batteries means that I don’t have to worry about an expensive (and possibly unobtainable) lithium ion battery dying on me and
making the camera unusable, and the 2,500 mAh Panasonic Eneloop Pro batteries I am currently using are superb.
As your reader James Duffy observed ( Inbox, AP 8 December), however, there is a downside to using a digital camera of this vintage in that it won’t work with anything bigger than a 4GB memory card, and low- capacity SD cards (which the Pentax uses) are no longer readily available. If you keep your eyes open though, cards of this type do appear for sale, and during the past few months I have picked up a handful of Toshiba 2GB SD cards in my local Computer Exchange (CeX) shop for £2 each, which work just fine. There is also another solution which I happened upon quite by chance. I found that if I took my 32GB microSDHC card, put it into a microSD to SD adapter, and then put the adapter into the Pentax, it worked! I have no idea why it works but it does, so it’s another option for keeping the camera in operation. I expect that one day the * ist DL will break down, and a camera repairer will tell me that it can’t be fixed, but until that day comes I am going to keep on using it. Douglas Thomson