Pentax K-S2 review: The K-S2 is a solid first-dSLR option if you don't care about video

Ricoh has been plugging away in the consumer dSLR space, even using flashing lights and a cornucopia of colors to attract first-time and family buyers to its Pentax models, away from more staid Nikons and Canons. With the K-S2, the company combines Pentax's two-tone tendencies and colored lights with a more staid design sensibility and the weather-sealed body, large viewfinder and solid photo quality that have long been the hallmarks of Pentax's entry-level cameras. The result is a really nice option, with a single big weakness: video capture.

7.7

Pentax K-S2

$279 at Amazon

The Good

The Pentax K-S2 offers excellent photo quality, a solid weather-sealed build, a big viewfinder and a broad feature set.

The Bad

Its video quality is middling to poor.

The Bottom Line

For the first-timer or family photographer, the Pentax K-S2 is a nice dSLR, but it drops the ball for video and you should pass on the new 18-50mm kit lens.

Image quality

Overall, the photos look excellent. JPEGs are clean up to ISO 800 -- ISO 1600 in good light. Beyond that, they get soft fast. Color is very good; bright and saturated yet still accurate in its default Bright setting. Auto white balance is generally good, though in indoor lighting, photos develop a yellowish/pinkish cast, depending upon the light sources.

Pentax K-S2 photo samples

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At press time, the only raw support for the K-S2 was the bundled SilkyPix software, and as far as I can tell there isn't a lot of detail you can recover from blown-out highlights without simply turning them brown, though you can bring up shadows without introducing too much noise. (Unfortunately, despite its popularity as a bundle choice, SilkyPix is -- at best -- impenetrable. Nor can you save as DNG for use in another program. I saved as a 16-bit TIFF file and used that in Lightroom.)

The big disappointment here is the video quality. If you leave shake reduction on, which most people probably want to do, the movies have a bad case of the wobbles; not just typical horizontal jello (rolling shutter), but vertical as well. If you turn off the SR, the wobbles go away but then it's got the shakes.

Those issues aside, video also suffers from serious moire -- brick buildings in the background are covered in not-so-groovy rainbows. The camera has Pentax's AA-filter simulator, which defeats the moire that results from removing the anti-aliasing filter from the sensor (which blurs the image just a bit in exchange for removing visual errors from high-frequency patterns). The simulator shifts the sensor slightly for a second shot and combines the two to cancel out the patterns. Unfortunately, the AA-filter simulator is not available during movie capture.

It's also limited for general movie recording because it lacks continuous autofocus in movie mode. You have to focus manually or prefocus and hope your subject doesn't move from the focal plane. Given how noisy the inexpensive Pentax lenses are, I can understand the company forgoing continuous AF. It does have good focus peaking (outlines for in-focus edges), which makes manually focusing relatively easy.

Analysis samples

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Performance

Editors' Note: We haven't tested any comparable cameras since reworking our test methods last summer, so we're not including a comparison chart. It will be included when we test other comparable cameras in the future.

I'd rank the K-S2's performance as good -- certainly good enough for the basic "kids, pets and travel" photography for which it's intended -- but not better than average. It's a little slow to start up at 1.2 seconds, which is a mirrorless-camera level performance rather than dSLR. it takes about 0.4 second to focus and shoot in good light, which slows to about 0.5 second in dim. Unfortunately, it doesn't always refocus when you press the shutter, and in general the kit lens is a slow mover, so the time it takes to focus depends upon how far out of focus you're starting from. It fares better when it comes to two shots in a row: 0.2 second regardless of whether it's raw or JPEG, which is good. And it only jumps to 0.9 second with flash enabled.

Though it's rated at 5.5 frames per second for continuous shooting, I couldn't get it to work that fast with autofocus enabled. With AF -- our normal test conditions -- it maxed out at 4.6fps for about 40 JPEGs and 4.5fps for about 10 raw. With focus fixed on the first frame and a shutter speed of 1/250 second I got it up to 5.4fps. However, 4.6fps should be fine for most burst-shooting situations.

The autofocus performance, however, was a bit frustrating. Aside from the aforementioned occasional reluctance to even try to focus, I found that in situations where focus was critical -- most notably during our lab testing -- it was off just a hair. I ended up having to manually focus for best results.

It could be the new collapsible kit lens, which, with the exception of the ability to focus fairly close, is pretty disappointing. Or it could be vibration from the thwack of the loud shutter and mirror slap.

But in most cases the focus is generally fine and continuous shooting with the 18-135mm lens had a decent hit rate where the panning focus accuracy (manually following bicyclists as they ride through the frame) was good enough for most uses. It does offer expanded-area autofocus, which uses surrounding points as backup when the subject moves off of your selected focus point.

The battery life isn't great, either, but that seems to be a trend thanks to the effort to make the bodies smaller.

Design and features

While the K-S2's boxier look isn't for everyone, you can dress it up with a variety of two-tone options that aren't as gaudy as many of the company's previous offerings. Like most dSLRs it has a deep, comfortable grip, though it's marginally larger and heavier than competitors. And it bests its similarly priced competitors by incorporating weather sealing to make it more dust- and water-resistant. It feels sturdily built without the usual plasticky feel of low-priced dSLRs.

An off/on/movie mode switch circumscribes the shutter button, which the K-S2 uses for recording instead of having a separate button like most cameras. It takes a little getting used to; in the beginning I kept zipping past "on" and ending up in movie mode.

In front of that sits the front adjustment dial, and behind it are the exposure-compensation button and Pentax's veteran green button, which resets aperture and/or shutter speed to the values that preserve a "correct" exposure. (In other words, if you're in shutter-priority mode and you've set the speed to a value that will underexpose the image, pressing the green button changes the shutter speed back to a value that will deliver a zero on the under/over exposure readout.)

There are quite a few interesting options on the K-S2's mode dial. In addition to the typical auto, manual and semimanual exposure modes, there are two user-settings slots, plus Pentax's Sensitivity Priority (Sv) and Shutter-and-Aperture Priority Autoexposure (TAv) modes and a new A-HDR (advanced high dynamic range) option.

In Sv you set the ISO sensitivity and the camera then chooses the appropriate shutter and aperture values, while in TAv you determine the shutter and aperture settings and the camera automatically chooses the appropriate ISO sensitivity. (The latter is the same as a manual mode with Auto ISO in some other cameras.)

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The A-HDR mode on the dial is really a special-effects mode; though you can choose the number of stops (+/- 1, 2 or 3) for the three-shot burst it combines, the result is the strong, contrasty faux-HDR look that we now associate with effects like Olympus' Dramatic Tone. However, for the real HDR capture in the control panel, you can select from three strengths (Types 1, 2 and 3) as well as the number of stops for each, which produces a much more natural HDR for scenes where you simply want to see detail in the highlights and the shadows. Unlike more sophisticated in-camera HDR solutions, however, it doesn't handle stuff moving through the scene well, and you end up with a lot of ghost people when shooting around crowds.

The other notable control on top is the Wi-Fi button, which turns into the self-portrait shutter release when the articulated display is facing forward. It's very well placed when you're gripping the camera backward with your left hand. It automatically refocuses before shooting; however, it will shoot even if it's not in focus and there's no way to override that.

On the back, controls are arranged like on most dSLRs, with ISO sensitivity, drive modes, white balance and flash controls as navigation buttons around a central OK, plus review and menu buttons and an Info button that pulls up a control panel. My only real complaint with the design of the K-S2 is the flat navigation buttons, which have little travel and are very easy to hit wrong.

The LCD is large enough and bright enough for most needs, and the viewfinder is particularly nice for this class of camera: it offers 100 percent coverage of the field of view and more magnification than similarly priced Canons or Nikons. It's also bright enough that it's usable at small apertures, when most consumer viewfinders get very dim.

On the side of the body, for left-hand operation, are a programmable raw/fx button, the autofocus/manual focus switch and a mic input jack.

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With this model, Pentax rolled out built-in Wi-Fi, dropping its third-party Flucard SD card solution. And while it's not very slick, it gets the job done, especially for remote shooting. Initially connecting to your mobile device works the same as almost every other camera: tap the near-field communications (NFC) mark to your Android phone or use the manual Wi-Fi connection on iOS. After jumping out of the remote view or even the app, it quickly regains the connection when jumping back in (at least on my original

Other notable features include Astrotracer, which works in conjunction with an optional GPS to shoot long exposures without star trails; a typical interval movie record, which produces in-camera time-lapses; and horizon correction, which straightens out slightly tilted photos automatically. In addition, there are two interesting white-balance options: multi-auto white balance (AWB), which balances subregions of the scene independently; and color temperature enhancement (CTE), which adjusts the overall white balance to emphasize a dominant color. I didn't really see much of a difference between multi- and standard AWB, but CTE produces interesting results.

Though the camera is straightforward to use if you've used a dSLR or advanced compact before, using some of the novel features take more work than necessary to understand. The manual describes how to access them, but does a pretty bad job of explaining what they are and why you might want to try them.

Conclusion

As a camera for the family photographer, the Pentax K-S2 is a solid option -- provided that the video issues aren't a deal-killer for you. I haven't yet had the opportunity to test its main competitor, the newly released Canon EOS Rebel T6i , but that and the older Nikon D5300, a higher-end camera that's dropped in price, are alternatives with better video cred. And if you do choose the K-S2, I suggest you pass on the 18-50mm collapsible lens kit.

Comparative specifications