Camera Test

As this issue was being prepared for publication, the Guggenheim Museum in New York was showing an excellent special exhibit called “Picasso Black and White.” Last year, the silent black-and-white film The Artist won the Oscar for Best Picture. And now Leica has given the world a serious digital camera designed to shoot black-and-white exclusively, the 18-megapixel M Monochrom ($7,950, street, body only).

Fujifilm’s elegantly retro X-Pro1 wowed us with great images, a cool hybrid viewfinder, and a comfortable set of controls when we tested it for our June 2012 issue. But its slightly sluggish autofocus and irksome manual focusing tempered our excitement. Plus, its $1,700 price tag (body only) put it out of reach for many photographers.

The new 16MP K-30 might be Pentax’s least-expensive DSLR, but it’s far from “entry level.” First off, it’s fully weathersealed: Pair it with one of Pentax’s weathersealed lenses, such as the 18–135mm f/3.5–5.6 WR kit lens or one of the premium optics in the DA* line, and you can shoot in a storm. Add to that a pair of command wheels, a 100-percent-accurate pentaprism finder, and 6-frames-per-second bursts, and you’ve got a camera that lives up to its more-than-entry-level pricing ($850, body only). How does it perform? Let's see.In the Lab

If there were a Drool Index for cameras, the Fujifilm X-Pro1 ($1,699, street, body only) would have been atop the list since its announcement back in January. Here was a new interchangeable-lens compact (ILC) that looked remarkably like an M-series Leica, right down to the bright-frame viewfinder. That it came from Fujifilm, whose discontinued S-series DSLRs still enjoy cult status, was icing on the cake. Now we can finally see if the craving was warranted.In the Test Lab