Pentax K200D Review

The K200D’s mode dial includes the usual suspects: aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual exposure, as well as program, bulb, and scene modes like Portrait, Sports and Flower. Each time you turn the mode dial, a small sample image shows up on the LCD monitor. For example, the “Moving Objects” mode displays a picture of some track athletes (below left). If you hit the INFO button and scroll down, the LCD displays a message explaining that the Moving Objects mode is for taking pictures of fast-moving objects.

Pentax’s exclusive Green button (above right) is useful when you want to adjust exposure settings in modes like Tv, Av and Program. When you’re in manual exposure mode (M), pressing the Green button gives you an instant automatic exposure setting (adjusts both aperture and shutter speed for optimal exposure). It’s almost like an “easy button” or a panic button if you can’t figure out the exposure. In Av, if you changed the exposure compensation and want an easy way to get it back, hit the exposure compensation button and the Green button at the same time to reset it to zero. The Green button does the same thing for flash exposure compensation. It can also be customized for manual exposure mode. There are four options. The default is for the Green button to adjust both the shutter speed and aperture. It can also be programmed to automatically adjust the shutter speed to match your chosen aperture, set the aperture to match your chosen shutter speed, or it can also be completely disabled.

The K200D offers an exposure mode I haven’t seen before called Sensitivity Priority (Sv). The Sv mode allows you to change the ISO on the fly while the camera picks the appropriate aperture and shutter speed. The camera also offers an interesting focus option called Catch-in focus. The Catch-in focus mode is set in the Custom Setting menu and will only work with manual focus lenses or lenses that have a switch for manual focus. It allows you to preset the focus and the camera will take the picture only when your subject comes into focus.

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