Wallace Koopmans Artlog

The Pentax 24EW remains a camera that seems to find its way into my bag when I travel.  It’s not that it has a fantastic telephoto capability and its not because it’s small and light (195g), there is one reason and one reason only and that is that it has that 24mm wide angle.  I […]

The lens on the 24EW is a smc PENTAX power zoom 24mm – 105mm F4.9-F12.5 lens; 7 elements in 5 groups.  At this point in time many of the point and shoot digital cameras remaining on the market start at an equivalent focal length of 24mm but one has to remember that this camera does […]

Sometimes what you need is a little extra width and when it comes to film point and shoot cameras there is nothing like the Pentax 24EW.  The Ricoh Gr21 has a wider focal length but does not zoom the Ricoh R1 goes to 24mm but only in its panoramic mode (It can be forcibly made to […]

Some images from the ever versatile Pentax 24EW shot in Niagara Falls Canada.  More on it can be seen here The Ewwwww  and here E X T R A   W I D E  and here  Snow Pictures Pentax 24EW and even here Wide Angle Point and Shoot and searching for 24EW here on my blog gives even more […]

Why would I choose to use a point and shoot film camera to take pictures in the snow?  Exposure compensation is my answer.  The Pentax 24EW has the best exposure compensation system of any point and shoot I have or am aware of.  It allows +-3 EV in half steps.  That is an enormous bonus when […]

E   X   T   R   A      W   I   D   E   Eww what terrible distorion you have.  Ewww what a slow lens you have.  Ewwwwwww why would you use this camera?  My answer ’24mm’ More can be seen and read here The Ewwwwwww  

I didn’t christen it the ewwwww that came courtesy of Duncan Turner.  The primary and interesting feature of the 24EW, and what helps gives it its name is the 24mm at the wide end of the lens.  The EW [pronounced /u/w/]  actually stands for Extra Wide but that’s hard to miss on the front anyway. Very few other fixed […]

As far as I’m aware there were very few wide angle capable point and shoot cameras ever made.  Ricoh made several including the R1s that I own, but most point and shoots started around 35mm at the wide end.  And then there is the Pentax Espio 24Ew.  The EW stands for ‘extra wide’, it’s lens […]

Sometimes a scene warrants a wide-angle shot so which ‘vintage’ film point and shoot provides the best quality?  This is a question that has been burning up the internet like an asbestos glove.  The three cameras compared here are ones that I happen to have. There may be others out there, as well as wider ones.  The […]

As the Canon Classic and the Pentax 24EW (pronounced 2-4-EEEEEeeeewwwww) fought it out to be the supreme irrelevant the Olympus mju III was waiting for it’s moment. In a move reminiscent of Doc Brown it has vualted forward from 2003 and staked it’s claim to be the preeminent irrelevant camera from around the turn of the last […]

If you’ve been waiting to find out which point and shoot camera you should have bought ten years ago, your prolonged wait is over.  PreviouslyI posted about the Canon Sure Shot Classic and the Pentax 24EW and now that I have the film back and scanned I was able to make a results comparison.  Well […]

What we have here are two very good compact film cameras from that awkward time when the digital megapixel race was to get to 1.2 Million.  Digital wasn’t quite there or in the mainstream and people were still wanting to take pictures of their cats.  So If you wanted a good quality camera around the turn of last century […]