Thank goodness for that, I'd only seen a still shot of that screen and thought it might have been a fixed volume level adjuster, doh! The video shows it as a real-time levels meter.

MJPEG .avi is less compressed than h.264 .mov so video files will be much smaller (probably at least 4 times smaller than K-5 files). Hopefully they won't overdo the compression though as this could lower video quality - anything less than 20Mbps in full HD could be a cause for concern (depending on the exact profile they use). h.264 compression needs much heavier video chip processing than MJPEG so overheating will still be a definite risk and I await some independent tests of that.

That's a good question about volume level indication and I can't find any mention of it in the specs. Frankly, volume level control is not going to be of much use unless you can monitor the levels visually!

Apart from that, and the extra weight, the K-3 looks good but I'll wait until the body prices fall well below £1,000 before taking the plunge, and by then we should know everything we need to know about its photo quality, video and everything else!

One thing I particularly like is the video time-lapse mode, up to 4K video at 2s to 1h intervals for up to 99 hours! It's unclear though if the 99 hours will apply to very short intervals such as 2 seconds - though the specs don't say it won't.

Quick Shift on the 55-300 has saved my bacon more than once when trying to shoot quickly out through window glass (especially the leaded variety!) in dull conditions, and near bushes with e.g. twigs in the foreground. If it starts doing its annoying long-hunting thing, I grab the quick shift collar to correct, then it usually re-focuses quickly where I want it. If not I just flick the manual focus lever.

So in certain conditions it can as I said save your bacon - garden birds etc. tend to disappear before I've had chance to open windows or let it hunt. And I too love this lens, thhough I cannot compare it with the Sigma or Tamron.

Well I bit.

K-5 + lens will fit in my anorak pocket now, I'll call it the K-5 P&S (point & shoot) or maybe the K-5C (candid).

Hmmm 40mm F2.8XS £149 unboxed, temptation... temptation...

'Twas all I had at the time though, apart from a 55-300 which would have been around F4.5 at the 100mm I needed from where I was, can't see how using that would have helped much. Sometimes you just have the wrong lens and then the more camera flexibility the better. It was pretty dark there.

No more cameras for me until this time next year though and by then, who knows what might be available!

Now that is exactly what makes it *interesting* to me.

Recently on Hallowe'en I tried to take available light photos of my grand kids by streetlight at one of their neighbour's front door, using a K-5 and my 100mm F2.8 at something like ISO 6400. The darned thing wouldn't focus properly - the street lamps were just a bit too far away and by the time I'd switched to manual everything, I'd missed the best shots.

K-5 II would have nailed it, I wish I'd had it. Yes the 50mm F1.4M might have have nailed it too if I had it with me (was a bit too far away though really) but you can't cart around every lens you have 'just in case' so the more the body can do, the better!

Yes, Virgin Media, and the upload speed on their 100Mbps service is 5Mbps, it may be increased eventually to 10Mbps but either way it's way faster then ADSL broadband upload speeds! Best though for Youtube uploads is BT fibre to the cabinet e.g. Infinity - I have just uploaded an HD file at 18Mbps using BT Infinity 2; it's 8 - 9Mbps on ordinary Infinity.

They may have left K-5II as mjpeg because the .h264 results as in K-30 would currently be of lower quality.

With K-5, just use the free Handbrake program to re-encode it to h.264/.mp4 at one tenth the size (for BBC/ITV HD quality). With my 4 core Athlon 965 and Windows 8 (7 will be similar) it takes just over 3 minutes to convert a minute of Pentax mjpeg as 1080p HD. And as you have almost infiniite quality/bitrate options in Handbrake, you will probably be able to do better than relying on any in-camera h.264 engine, in spite of the re-encode. I think of Pentax mjpeg as 'video RAW'.

Oh, and if you can, get BT Infinity or a fast VM connection for amazingly rapid uploads to Youtube!

Just thought I'd add to this interesting thread (as I can't find a more relevant recent one) that I lost my K-5 battery charger and had to quickly find a replacement locally, so I tried the Jessops 2 terminal universal charger at £19 (£6 online discount with store pickup) and it appears to work well. Charging is slow, about 6 hours - but it has saved my bacon!