Finally joined!

I've just joined the website having been a magazine subscriber for some time & have used Pentax SLRs for over 30 years.

I'm thinking of buying a digital SLR & been looking at the K-7. I've looked at other posts on here & also read a few reviews which mostly are good. My only concern is one review compared the K-7 with a Canon & a Nikon and even though they recommended it, the image quality & metering system did not come out very well - the images looked pretty flat in comparison.

Is this just a one-off or have others been disappointed with image results? I wouldn't want to move to a different brand but wouldn't want to be disappointed with the results either.

If any K-7 users out there have any thoughts I'd be grateful, thanks.

Gordon

Hi, and welcome to the forum.
I cannot answer your question on the choice and IQ of the K-7 as I have only a K10d, which I am very pleased with.

There are others who will give some comments regarding the K-7 I am sure.

Regards

Image quality from the Pentax DSLRs is fine - look at all the superb images on this site and ePHOTOzine for a start to be reassured.

Reviewers have their own slant on things and I guess it depends on what they had set up the K7 to do. Generally, Pentax favours sharp and detailed images, but noise at high ISO may be higher. With the other marques, they will have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Pentax colour reproduction IMHO is second to none.

However, these differences are subtle in many cases and operator handling will have much more effect on the final result.

Buy with confidence.

Hello and welcome.

Like Weldingblues, I have the K10D, of which I think is a brilliant camera. There are loads of friendly people on this forum who have the K7, and are happy to advise.

G

Gordon welcome

this is the best place to ask all your question

I have 2 K20 and love them IQ is excellent metering is also excellent how ever you can tweak the metering.

on the review did the K7 have the latest firmware installed?

James

G'day and welcome - K10 and Kx in the stable here, and they (along with the Pentax glass) make for a quality system. Any faults with the pictures I take are mine - not the Pentax gear!

Welcome to the forum.

Don't believe everything you read in the comics, how many adverts for canon and nikon were in the mag your review was in?

Most editors push the products of their biggest advertiser!

Here you go my friend, some shots from Flickr which were taken with the K7. And by the way welcome.

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/pentax/k-7/

Welcome to forum. I hope you'll enjoy with this forum as me. Great place.
Welcome again.

Hello and welcome to the Forum

Thanks for all the comments, very helpful.

I'll probably get on the phone to SRS soon & order it as no-one in the Plymouth area stocks them. I'm hoping the K-7 will be just as good & reliable as my ME-Super always has been - an excellent camera.

I wasn't keen on defecting to Canon anyway!

Hi and welcome.

You can use your ME-S lenses on a K-7, try that with 30 year old canon lenses!

There are a couple of things I am slightly disappointed with when it comes to the K-7 but image quality isn't one of them.

Welcome to the forum btw

Sadly, some reviewers are so used to the Canon or Nikon looks (and menu systems and handling and everything else) that any other manufacturer often appears to be judged according to how close they get to the Canon and Nikon benchmarks.

Different manufacturers tend to produce slightly different looking images. The Pentax approach appears to be a little more "hands off" in terms of in camera processing, but leaving lots of flexibility for you to tweak to your heart's content in post-processing. That said, there are so many different ways of fine-tuning the settings in the camera, that you can generally set it up to produce what you want. If the review you mentioned left things in the default "natural" mode, that would explain a comparatively restrained output before post-processing.

In terms of colour and tonality, Olympus and Pentax are the most pleasing to me, and indeed also the manufacturers that get closest to the look that we might previously have got when using film.

Image quality from the K-7 is excellent, particularly so if you are happy to use it in RAW. And I find the metering system to be generally very reliable, the focussing to be fast enough for my needs (I have used the continuous AF to take successful shots of a charging springer spaniel using the kit 50-200 lens) and auto white balance (esp indoors) to be significantly better than most other dSLRs I have used.

However, if you want high ISO JPEGs that are ready to go straight out of the camera with no post-processing, then Nikon is probably the way to go. Or possibly the Canon 7D. Personally, I think the whole issue of high ISO noise is the cause of way too much fuss, and I am happy with the Pentax approach of leaving more noise in the images but also retaining more detail.

I also feel you cannot over-estimate the advantage of packing all the K-7's punch into a camera that is so much more compact than its competitors. The Canon and Nikon equivalents are so much larger that personally it would make a difference to whether I bothered to take them out in the first place. I realise that others will feel differently about this, but most of my photography is done on foot, and after using public transport. I don't need to cart a load of bulky equipment with me.