I wonder whether the blue K-30 owner has returned by now...

The camera needs to support some minimal colour depth to yield an image like that. I have an older compact that couldn't do it. Also I believe he has done some post processing to achieve the smooth tonality gradients (that's not just soft lighting). I like this look and I see it more often in FF shots.

Well, typical cover shots don't require an FF or even MF camera at all. With good studio lighting my K100D + Tamron 18-250 combo produces cover worthy shots. In addition, Benjamin Kanarek often goes for a smeared, dragged shutter look, which reduces the need for any kind of fidelity.

BTW, define "need". I do not need to take photos at all. But I want to. And I want an FF camera as well.

Can't wait for the Pentax FF to hit the market, but was surprised to what extent Bill Gekas manages to make the K-5 look like an FF camera.

Have a look at his Potatoes image. I love the smooth tonality transitions.

If you want to fully appreciate it, download Issue 17 of F11-magazine, scoot to page 86, and watch it full screen on a calibrated monitor (not too close though, as the resolution isn't quite up there). Amazing.

Thanks!

The Nebula was exposed for 30s using f/2.8 and ISO 800. I pushed it in post by 2.47 stops and cropped the image to yield an improved composition.

The inner part of the nebula is actually overexposed and I protected it from the exposure push I applied to other parts of the images. I could superimpose this image with another 10s exposure I made, but I think it wouldn't look much different to my manual darkening of the core.

At this magnification, 30s on a regular tripod would result in star trails already and I wouldn't recommend to go over 20s without an equatorial mount.

Well, how does a K-5 improve the standard of your photography over what you can get from a Q or your phone?

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that FF has advantages over APS-C (frogfish's post lists some of them). Moreover, the typically quoted disadvantages stem from comparing apples with oranges (such as comparing f/2.8 APS-C zooms with f/2.8 FF zooms rather than the equivalent f/4 FF zooms).

Whether someone can turn the technical advantages into better images, is another question, of course. I'd submit, however, that the enthusiasm that most of us develop for new and better gear can help to put more time and energy into photography and thus, indirectly, help to make us better photographers.

A poor man's way of calibrating your monitor is using respective calibration images.

I'd recommend using a hardware calibrator (make sure you get a spectrophotometer if you have a wide-gamut display), but manually adjusting the monitor with the above calibration images will deal with the most important tone issues.

Now owning the Samyang (Rokinon), in my opinion optically there is no contest. The Samyang wins hands down.

The M85/2 is much smaller and if that is important to someone, it can be the better choice. In any other respect, I'd prefer the Samyang, though.

I recently (13/12/2012) took the fantastic Mt John Night-time Observatory Tour and met another Pentax user from the UK with a blue K-30 and an astro-tracer unit.

We've met again on the same night at the Church of the Good Shepherd to take some more shots of the marvelous night sky over Lake Tekapo in New Zealand.

Here are my humble shots of the church:

(visit image at Flickr).

You can see the Southern Cross in the above shot; I've marked it for easier identification in the following:

(visit image at Flickr).

Also highlighted are the two "pointers" -- Alpha Centauri (4.3 light-years away) and Beta Centauri (350 light-years away) -- that help to find the Southern Cross in the night sky. Southern Hemisphere only, though, sorry.

Turning around a 180°, we could see Jupiter as a bright object over Lake Tekapo.

(visit image at Flickr).

Thanks to Dallas Poll for setting up an equatorial mount and allowing us to use it with our cameras. Here's the Orion Nebula, shot with a Pentax FA* 200/2.8.

(visit image at Flickr).

All this thread is missing now are the shots by the blue K-30 user. They looked awesome on his back LCD already...

Hey Pete,

just to confirm what you probably already know by now:

An AF adjustment does not affect what you see in the viewfinder.

It is just a software value informing the AF algorithm about the amount of compensation needed to obtain precise focus.

An AF adjustment does affect manual focus confirmation, though.

1. Turning the "volume down" does not work since once the sensels have reached their full-well capacity you cannot save anything anymore by using less than a unity-gain in A/D conversion.

Any ISO settings that are lower than the sensor's native ISO are achieved by overexposing the image during the shot and downscaling it digitally later. The tell-tale sign of doing so is a loss of dynamic range (due to the downscaling).

2. There is no such thing as a common "native ISO" for all Pentax cameras. The native ISO is determined by the sensor used.

The K-5's Sony sensor probably has a native ISO of ~100 (if not 80), but certainly not ISO 200. Otherwise, you would not see an increase of dynamic range up until ISO 80. Pentax may have employed some special shadow noise reduction to boost measured DR figures for the ISO 80 setting (that isn't used by neither Sony nor Nikon) but a) that is just a speculation unless proven, and b) it seems impossible to achieve the K-5's ISO->DR graph (see DxOMark) with a sensor that only has a native ISO of 200.