I got my K7 today for £549:99 at the Pentax dealer shop in Seaford. The shop offered me £250 part exchange for my K10D body and was selling the K7 body for £799. So I feel I got a really good deal out of that. Also sadly my godmother passed away recently after a long battle with illness and bequethed with £500 which I planned to put towards my camera upgrade. I thought I would have to pay around maybe £800 for the part exchange with my old K10D body but when he offered the deal I've really only paid out £49 of my own money for the K7.

I'm trading in my K10D for the new K7 this Saturday and can't wait to get my hands on it. Well done Pentax.

Interesting about Pentax only having about 6% of the market. When my Dad and I go to photographic charter shoots on preserved steam railways we always find that there's ourselfs with the K10D, probably one or two others with the K20D then about 35 others with Canons and Nikons - charters are usually confined to about 40 photographers on the lineside due to elf & safety. So I can very much believe those stats.

For me it's was managing to get 3 photos published in one copy of Steam Railway Magazine. I had only converted over to digital 2 year's ago from my P30T to the K10D and if anyone's tried their luck with mainstream magazines they might find that Editor's do like to publish photos from the same established names every month. So any new photographer sending photos up in the hope of getting them published can find that it's almost a case of being extremely patient and to a certain extent banging ur head against a brick wall when you see the same photographers names under the published photos and your's hasn't been used. I had tried for about 18 months issue after issue since I got my K10D of sending photos up and finally in the June edtion of Steam Railway the editor published 3 photos. One was a double-page spread, the second on the centre page Gallery section and the 3rd a smaller print towards the back pages of the magazine. My old Dad was dead chuffed for me as he's a steam enthusiast aswell as a keen photographer and it was a great sense of achievement to finally get a breakthrough.

Yep not a bad day, I honestly didn't think I'd be offered much more than £20 for my 18-55mk1. So when he offered £100 part exhange and meant I'd pay £299 for the 17-70 I just smiled and said "done thank you very much"!

Yep I couldn't believe it when the Pentax dealer offered me £100, especially when I've seen second hand 18-55mm Mk1's on Park Camera's website selling for just £25! But then I thought I'll just keep quite and be happy with the deal.

Thanks for the advice I may well upgrade my K10 body to the K7 body in January. Today I part exchanged my 18-55mm kit lens that I got with the K10 for the Pentax 17-70mm lens. The Pentax dealer shop in Seaford was selling the lens for £399, I got £100 for my 18-55mm lens, so I got the new lens for £299 which is not bad considering Park Camera's are selling it for £479. http://www.parkcameras.com/9771/Pentax-17-70mm-SMC-DA-F4-AL-IF-SDM.html

I'm currently thinking about trading in my K10D which I've had for about 2 year's now for the K7. Is there a huge amount of difference between the K10 and K7 in terms image quality and sharpness to justify this? I've found in the past the K10 struggles a bit with grain and white balance when taken shots in low lighting conditions and on high ISO setting, has the K7 sorted out these issues? Any advice would be appreciated, cheers.