*ist D

General Description

The *ist D was the first digital Pentax K-mount camera that actually hit the market (in 2003).

Like all Pentax K-mount digital cameras (at least until 2014), the *ist D incorporates an image sensor with the dimensions 23.5 mm x 15.7 mm. This digital sensor format with 28.3 mm diagonal is considerably smaller than the 36 mm x 24 mm small image format of analogue Pentax K-mount cameras, whose 43.3 mm diagonal is 1.53 times longer. Thus, for the digital sensor format, “normal” lenses have a focal length of 28mm or 35mm, yielding the same angle of view like 43mm or 53mm lenses mounted on an analogue K-mount camera.

With the *ist D, Pentax introduced an all new AF system (SAFOX VIII) with 11 AF sensors of which 9 are sensitive to both, horizontal and vertical structures. All Pentax AF systems before had sensors that were sensitive to either horizontal or vertical structures, not for both.

The *ist D is the only Pentax digital K-mount camera that uses CompactFlash (CF) cards or MicroDrives as storage media. All later Pentax digital K-mount cameras use SD cards.

The *ist D and all its exposure and metering modes are fully compatible with all Pentax K-mount lenses with auto focus (F-, FA-, FA-J-, DFA- and DA- series) as well as with the manual focus A-series lenses, provided that the lens’s aperture ring (if existant) is locked in the “A” position. For K- and M-series lenses as well as for lenses with an aperture ring that is turned away from the “A” position, the lens shall be used either in “Av” mode (at open aperture, only) or in “M” mode (at the selected aperture and with stop-down metering). This is due to the fact that the *ist D like all later Pentax K-mount digital cameras has no ability to read out the position of the lens’s aperture ring (because the camera has no aperture simulator).

Technical Specifications

Subjective Evaluation