You're such a wuss, Mike ... it's just technique, doncha know.

I like the composition very much. The colours seem a little too bright to be natural, but otherwise it's very good.

The symmetry is nice, softened by the framing from the foliage, and the bench in particular is really clever, since it implies the presence of the watcher.

I have long admired Alan's pictures, and I like these very much as always. But in reality they say a lot more about the photographer than the camera.

I don't think it's possible to say that they indicate a great deal about the camera at the size that we're seeing them here.

I'd agree that the amount of fine detail in the Kingfisher, Nuthatch and solitary Blue Tit pictures is excellent, and possibly very slightly greater than we'd normally see from the K-5 (as indeed should be the case, with all those extra MP), but I'm not convinced that they show anything else.

In fact the one of Bluey and Woody doesn't have the crispness that the others have, even at the woeful size we're still limited to here, and the Treecreeper's green background looks rather noisy.

I am still desperately hoping that the K-3 is as good as some of the eulogies so far suggest, but I am starting to find the uncritical nature of some of the comments about the camera rather trying, based, as they often are, on small images that are the result of clearly very capable, but nevertheless unknown editing workflow.

Oh dear. If one had to be an expert in a particular genre of photography to pass comment on examples of it, there would be practically no worthwhile critique ever.

That aside, in the 100% crop, what's the white halo around the dark edges? Was this a JPG out of the camera without post processing, or have you done something to it?

This is especially relevant given that the EXIF appears to show ISO 125 being used, so the amount of noise in the image is quite troubling.

Also, the ball looks as if it's glowing in these shots so it would be worth knowing what's been done to the images.

A bit more information would be helpful before any conclusions can be drawn from these shots.

Very nice. There's an intangible something about these that reminds me of when people were posting K20D shots and comparing them with K10D pictures.

It should be hard to tell the difference at web display sizes, but somehow there was an indefinable extra something with those too.

They certainly look quite good.

How many OOF ones were there, and how many as good as this were there in the entire set?

That would give an indication of how good the AF was.

For instance, if I took 100 photos with the K-5, and enough light to shoot at 1/1000s like these, I'd expect to get about 15 as good as this, so the proportion of in-focus shots would be good to know.

Perhaps a few 100% crops would give an indication of how sharp they actually are. It's not easy to tell, in reality, at this size.

They're both very nice pictures indeed, but I'm afraid the downsize to 800px makes them useless as a comparison.

I think (or maybe I imagine) that the K-3 image shows a little more fine detail, but the only way of letting people compare the cameras is to put the DNGs online somewhere.

And the istD range were 1/150 I think. It's creeping up.

I'd guess that if Pentax thought it was a real priority, they'd have commissioned a better shutter.

But given that fast accurate AF hasn't been any kind of priority for them until, we hope, now, does anyone really imagine that fast sync is going to be right up there as a priority when even the full frame Nikon D610's X-sync is only 1/200?

Interestingly, the D610 spec sheet says this:

[quote="they of whom we may not speak"]X=1/200 s; synchronizes with shutter at 1/250 s or slower (flash range drops at speeds between 1/200 and 1/250 s)[/quote]I don't know how that works - I'd have thought the sensor is either fully open or it's not, but there's obviously something else going on.

If Pentax have some serious rabbits to pull out of hats with this new 'big thing', it's possible of course that they've been reserving their fab new shutter for the new FF flagship.

Mm, my K-5 is worse than that.

But not as bad as this poor guy's K-3 though, over on the US forum...

I'm sure your camera will be perfect to within one minute of arc, John

Sorry for the earlier smiley - I may be wrong, but I get the impression some people are suspecting that I (and loads of others, by implication) are imagining the problem?