Pentax K20D review

Like all of Pentax's current dSLRs, the K20D accepts the company's K-mount lenses. One of the nice things about Pentax's K lens system is that you can use the vast majority of the lenses the company has made with the K20D.

If you're willing to buy an adaptor on eBay -- we'd stick to the official Pentax-made adapters if we were you -- you can even use screw mount (aka M42) lenses dating back to the 1960s. You may have to focus manually when you use these lenses, since they weren't made for autofocus. Still, it's a nice bargain if you can deal with that limitation and given the differences in lens coatings over the years, it can be a fun way to give your shots a slightly different look.

Sony's Alpha DSLR-A700 (left) opts to blur away the noise in this shot at ISO 3,200, while the Pentax K20D (right) blurs less and retains more finer detail. You can always set the K20D to blur more if you prefer that, but we like having the option of leaving out the blur

If you plan on adding one of Pentax's accessory flashes to your bag of gear, you'll like the fact that the K20D includes wireless flash control. You can't group flashes or set ratios between flashes, but you can control the flash output with the camera's flash compensation setting, which is conveniently changed in the flash setting part of the Fn menu.

Also, you can set the camera to use the built-in flash along with one or multiple wireless flashes, or you can set the built-in flash to just control the wireless flashes and not fire when the picture is taken. In case you're wondering, the wireless flash works with Pentax's P-TTL flash metering.

Performance
Its performance proved impressive, though the K20D's burst mode just can't keep up with other cameras in this price range. However, it was quite fast out of the gate, clocking a scant 0.2 seconds to start up and capture its first JPEG. Subsequent JPEGs took 0.4 seconds between shots with the flash turned off, rising to 0.8 seconds with the flash turned on.

Raw shots took 0.4 seconds between shots, also without flash. Shutter lag measured 0.4 seconds in our high-contrast test and 1 second in our low-contrast test, which mimic bright and dim shooting conditions, respectively.

The K20D's 1620mAh lithium-ion rechargeable battery will give you up to 530 shots per charge when using the flash for 50 per cent of those shots, though that climbs to 740 shots per charge if you don't use the flash at all. Of course, that doesn't compare terribly well with the Canon EOS 40D's rating of 800 images with 50 per cent flash or 1,100 without.

Image quality
Image quality is also impressive. The switch to CMOS not only gave Pentax the capability to add live view shooting, it also let it get better control over noise at higher ISOs. Strangely, you'll still notice speckles at ISO 3,200 and ISO 6,400 on the K20D, but that's partially because the camera defaults to minimal noise reduction. You can turn that up if you like, but we preferred it low because that let the images retain a large amount of finer detail that becomes blurred away on a lot of other cameras.

The sensor-shift Shake Reduction certainly helps to keep images blur-free to an extent, but it could probably be more effective. We were able to get more than one stop of leeway -- meaning we could shoot at a shutter speed less than half as fast as we normally would.