K-5 Sloooow Lo Speed continuous shooting

Having just bought a K-5 to replace my K-7 I'm loving it ..............except for the abysmally slow Lo Speed continuous shooting which at 1.6fps is too slow for Street Photography. Hi speed at 7fps is great for Sport but for Street it's overkill. 3fps on the K-7 was perfect for Street.

Of course this does allow Pentax to boast that on continuous you can keep shooting jpegs until the card fills. Some achievement.

Anyone else feel as I do? I had hoped that a firmware upgrade would address this but no such luck.

Yes I agree, 1.6fps is totally ridiculous.

Whoever thought up that idea needs to be shot, 3 or 4 would have been just right.

Even the K10D could do that at 3.5FPS!

I suppose what you are asking for is a continuously variable setting? I don't see whay it couldn't be done, but I've never seen it mentioned before so maybe nobody has thought it was needed.

"needs to be shot." That's a bit harsh!

However the idea that 1.6fps is useful for anything other than advertising is idiotic.

I looked for that John hoping that Pentax had it hidden somewhere in the book, the menu or the drive screen. No such luck.

I think a continuously variable setting is needed.

That's "progress" for you.

FWIW:

K10D = 10Mp, K-5 = 16Mp = bigger files

Matt

I find that up to 30 16mp fine jpegs at the higher 7 fps level is OK for me.

This would be a good one for the person at Pentax on here to answer including why the drop mentioned for the LO mode.

I'm going to guess that the Lo rate is the fastest possible rate that can be continuous until the card is full.

The fast rate can of course be reduced by using a slower shutter speed. You can't do 7fps with a shutter speed of 1/2 second for example.

Slowing the frame rate by slowing the shutter speed will work, but isn't too useful if you're looking to freeze motion, which is usually the point with continuous shooting - I mean why would you be using continuous shooting in the first place if you weren't photographing moving targets?

What person from Pentax on here?

Apart from one comment made by someone working for their advertising agency I have never seen anyone from Pentax on the forum.

But on the plus side you would get plenty of motion blur

Not a big fan of motion blur, to be honest. Nine times out of ten, even when it's intentional, it looks a bit rubbish to me. There are exceptions, including some highly notable and genuinely creative ones, of course.

So you would rather have a static propeller on an aircraft rather than one with blur? or a superbike going round a corner looking as if its parked up rather than moving at high speed, or a runner looking like a waxwork dummy?

There are more than a few exceptions methinks.


Oh, and the motion blur comment was actually meant to be light hearted ... slowing the shutter speed to compensate for not having a sensible Lo continuous option is as daft as having it at 1.6fps