Live View Magnification

Suffering as I do with the declining eyesight that accompanies old age I was persuaded to trade in my K10 for a K20 in order to make use of the live view feature. The blurb said that in preview mode one could use the magnification in order to achieve accurate focussing.
In my case this turns out to be untrue - firstly the magnification is in two steps only, 4x and 8x, and in both the picture quality is terrible, not through pixelation though, just bad. I think I did once get a higher magnification but then pixelation was very severe.
In review mode the picture is superb and can be magnified 32x without any great loss of quality.
There is nothing in the manual ( or in the Magic Lantern) that is of help,
Am I doing something wrong or is the camera faulty? In every other respect the K20 performs superbly.

K20D liveview is certainly not the best .. infact I always presumed it was just included as an afterthought as all the other manufacturers were doing it. Things got a lot better with the K-7 and now the K-5 has improved on that.

I have the GX20 and occasionally try to get some use out of live view, but invariably switch back to optical preview. I agree with Mike - it was a poorly-executed me-to job. I'm sorry that you seem to have upgraded on a pretence. However, the K20 is definitely worth upgrading to for a host of other reasons: and I've learned to live with autofocus!

Cheers

Tony

The live view mode on the newer models are a massive improvement over the GX20 & the K20d. The screen on the GX20 is always going to be poor anyhow due to the minuscule pixel count

Welcome to the forum cbrog.

Isn't that what AF is for

My poor old eyes aren't what they were either but I find it a lot easier to focus through the viewfinder that messing about with liveview, I found LV on the K20 Ok for checking composition when the camera was low down and the viewfinder was innaccessible.

I dont know as yet if the LV on the K5 is any better as a focusing aid, though it is a lot easier to use.

If the dioptre adjustment on the K20 viewfinder isn't strong enough for you I believe there is a clip on magnifier or even a Dioptre adjustment piece available.

I've given up trying to use LV on the K7 as every time I try it it tells me the battery is flat, unless I've only just started using a freshly charged battery!

AS far as I know they used digital zoom inside liveview on the K20D.

So for example lets say the normal liveview has 800x600 pixels.
If you zoom in 2x the camera does not adapt so that a smaller part of the sensor is used but it will zoom in the 800x600 liveview so it becomes 400x300 and if you zoom in 4x it becomes 200x150.

They changed that with the K7.

Thank you all for your remarkably unanimous comments!

Lesson 1: Always do some research.
Lesson 2: Specsavers?

Specsavers won't help, getting a K7 or K5 will

Ah but at least Specsavers use PENTAX lenses

Its just a pity you didn't find the forum before been persuaded to upgrade to the K20D, you cant beat a bit of hands on experience and advice.

On the upside the K20D produces larger files which gives you more scope for cropping images without loss of image quality, it does have the larger text in the menu, and the high ISO noise is better than the K10D

Stick around and lets see if were able to help you with anything else (not that we were much help with this one:blush