Upgraded to the K7 over a K10D... big disappointment. Would suggest it might be a much lesser upgrade from the K20. The K5 on the other hand has been improved in a number of areas making it worth the upgrade.
The K5 is what the K7 should have been.

I count the K7 as a loss. Just wish I owned a business to recoup some of that loss.

Uses to be a huge SilkyPix fan. You could squeeze out better color and noise fixing that with LR.
Sadly, it sort of stagnated. Never fully built up a good set of non-destructive tools; paintbrush, gradient, etc... that LR now has. Plus their stone-aged licensing (at least here in the US) caused me to drop them.
Although you could tweak out better images than on LR, it took a bit of work to get better results then LR. Extra work for very little gain when you really get down to what a third party will ever notice. Extra work that takes time away from my enjoying photography and from making money on photos... spending an extra minute or six on each photo just wasn't financially sound.

To stake the dead horse been further, now at LR3, I wonder if it stands up at all. Certainly with the super noise reduction in LR3, I really doubt SilkyPix could hold its own.

PaintShop Pro was great at version 9, a bit slow as I believe it was built on Macromedia framework (UGH!!) Once they went to version 10 (new owner of Corel), everything went to hell. Color calibration was trash. I would hope the latest version is better, but I believe it is still very slow and never heard if color calibration ever got fixed.


I think your only real choices are LightRoom 3.3, and if you need extra processing work, Photoshop Elements.
Everything else pales.


ACDSee Pro Photo manager used to be great. If they ever fixed huge (HUGE) issues, that might be a great alternative to LightRoom. I preferred its cataloging workflow to LightRoom's. Just with v2.5 and the next couple versions it went completely down the tubes.
It has some interesting RAW processing. It was always very FAST!! Much much faster than lightRoom, even than lightRoom3. It was the one thing that kept me from moving to a Mac many years ago. (Then they broke everything and I had not reason to stay with Windows. If they every fix their issues I might even move back. )

Dunno. My through is that they might be downloaded as part of the install to ensure you always have the latest set. It would make sense, but don't really know for sure.

OK, thought I had just messed up. Very odd.
Maybe the download is getting more popular and the background downloading of profiles has slowed? We could probably guess for a week, but at least it seems to get sorted out eventually.

Ah, working now. Dunno what happened.

Hmmm, got 3.3 installed but still no Pentax profiles.

How do you see these? When I look at lens corrections settings, Pentax profiles are nowhere to be seen.

(edit)
Erg!! never mind. Looked at About lightRoom 3 and it is still at 3.2.
So what was masquerading as LightRoom3 updating for half an hour?

Will try again... ugh

Dang!! Very impressive. I could not get anything like that with the DA* 16-50. I have been unable to focus at all by the time the dog reaches me.
Of course, I suppose further away subjects should focus more easily - less focusing difference from point to point. ??? I may need to try with my longer lens once it gets back from the shop.

Thanks for posting that. I was about to post a question regarding my Pentax 50mm 1.4 at f1.4.
I know it is expected to be less sharp at both ends, but it is much softer than I had expected.

I'm guessing that is normal?
I was about to send mine in to get adjusted. Apparently not necessary.

Mine seems a tad bit worse, but did with black and white magazine print. and showed more chromatic aberrations... maybe just being black&white rather than blue&white?.
It is about 10 years old, so maybe not a bad idea anyway.

Still, oddly glad to see it

Well, if you don't have the need you certainly have no reason to upgrade. Wise decision.

But, if you're doing action photography in low light conditions (lets say dog agility with indoor lighting) and you need to compete for sales against someone who can take quality photos at 1/500sec or higher when you can only take photos at 1/30sec... then you will find the high ISO capability worthwhile.

Have to admit, the K5 is getting into niche market areas.... certainly not a requirement nor an improvement for a lot of what many photographers do. i.e. used the K5 for a Xmas portrait session last night. I actually find the 16MP image to be almost unwieldy in Photoshop and way more than sufficient for "small prints" of 8x10 (A4) or smaller. Definitely no need for low ISO or 7fps! Heck, the strobes only recharge once or twice per second.