Saturday, April 19, 2008

Tips From The Manual (Or Not!): Quick ISO Setting

Long time no post, it's been a rough couple of weeks in The Real World(tm) but I wanted to come back and provide a couple of K20D tips that you may or may not know, depending on whether you read the manual or not (always highly recommended!).

First one is for quick access to the ISO setting. On my *ist-D the only way to change the ISO setting was to put the camera down, set the left top dial to ISO, adjust it with the right e-dial, set the left top dial back, and return the camera to your eye (and it never was shown in the viewfinder!). On the K20D I thought that the procedure was a bit more streamlined... you hit the function button, hit the right arrow, select the ISO, and hit OK. Not bad, but not great.

What you'll find on page 79 of the manual is that if you hold down the "OK" button and adjust the front e-dial, you can adjust the ISO setting. No taking the camera from your eye, and the ISO shows up (at least temporarily, depending on what your custom fuction for ISO in the viewfinder is set to). Nice and quick!

Now there are a couple of caveats to this. If you have the custom functions for your e-dials set to adjust ISO via the custom functions (Page 74) in Sv/Tv/Av mode the OK+e-dial shortcut won't work in these modes, you'll only be able to use the e-dial you set via the custom menu.

Hope this little tip helps you out!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or... you could just go to "menu/ Custom setting" and scroll down to 21, 22 and 23 and set the rear e-dial to adjust your ISO settings on the fly. One button... no fumbling. It only works in SV, TV and AV modes... but it's faster there than using 2 buttons.