Excellent Affordable Digital SLR

The Pentax DS is well constructed. It inspires confidence when handled. It is intuitive and easy to learn. Auto Focus is accurate and exposures are consistant.

I bought the Pentax DS because I had come to trust Pentax according to my very good experience with their film SLRs. I was not dissappointed!

It is backward compatible with all Pentax bayonet lenses. There are of course limitations with lenses not having the electrical contacts, but options on the DS make those lenses quite usable and older lenses are favored by many DS users. It can also be used with M42 screw mount lenses with an adapter. Obviously manual focus lenses will still be manually focused.

Recent firmware 2.0 released by Pentax in December of 2005 has made the DS function with the improvements made in the follow-on DS2.

The DS consistently underexposes by 0.5 EV or less. However, other DSLR like Canon EOS 350D is reported to overexpose by 0.4 according to users reports on photozone.de

Underexposing is preferable to overexposing which is easier corrected in post processing so this is not a totally negative thing and certainly not a serious problem.

Auto Focus speed is a little slower than previous Pentax film SLRs I have owned such as the ZX-L and the ZX-5n and users reports indicate it is a little slower than other brands. However, it is certainly not too slow at all. I do not miss shots due to AF speed. Auto Focus has been accurate and consistent for me. Others report the same on dpreview.com

As of this writing I have owned my DS for 1 year and have made about 6000 images without any failures at all. I have not required service for it or a single call to Pentax.

Ricehigh's opinion here must be carefully considered as being unfairly biased. He appears to have a personal vendeta against Pentax according to his own posts on dpreview.com where he is currently banned. There he posted numerous "tests" that could not be reproduced by other users and he consistently posted these "tests" in an apparent quest to energize a negative opinion of Pentax products.

He has posted here a comprehensive guide apparently to garner an opinion that he is unbiased and attempting to benefit the reader. His opinion about QC problems and inaccurate results with the Pentax DS are not shared by the 100's of users on dpreview.com. Be sure to read the reviews posted on that site about all the Pentax Digital SLRs and you will find them to be among the highest rated by users on that site.