Today in Sheffield at Norfolk Park there was a Summer Fayre that Andrew A, Neil (gtis) and myself went to. We all had Pentaxes of course and met an older gentleman with a K30. He said he also had a Canon, but liked the Pentax better and had several other Pentax cameras.

Regards
David

It hunts a lot more on older bodies. On the K-5II variants the problem has almost completely gone away and I would imagine it performs well on the K30 too. Any hunting is more than compensated for by image quality, which for a lens of this price is quite incredible.

Regards
David

1000px on the longest edge averages out at about 550kb on K-5 files, depending on the image content. I don't think there's much point in uploading anything larger as it just get compressed anyway and takes longer to upload. At least if you set the size to this first you can control the compression yourself.

BTW, I also like the images posted by the OP, they could be a little brighter but the colours and everything else are good. The K50 is clearly very good.

Regards
David

Agreed, good point. I was thinking more about noise as the K-7 goes higher up the ISO scale.

Agreed, so am I! However, what camera(s) we all own are our own personal choice. I still love the K-x although I have just given mine to my son, it's a great little camera and performs well at high ISO's, probably much better than a K-7 in this respect. It does not have the alloy body, weather sealing, ergonomics etc. of a K-7 though, so I would not claim that it is 'better'.

Trying to wade through all of the points made in this thread is quite difficult, but if I understand Nigel correctly, the whole argument is about whether or not it is worth trading up to a K-5 (mk1 or mk2) from a K-7 at present. I would say 'yes' - you can buy a Mk1 K-5 brand new for less than £400 at SRS, deduct from this what you would get for selling the K-7 and that seems to me quite a bargain.

The increase in overall IQ, across all types of shooting situations would be significant. You would confidently be able to use the K-5 at 3200 ISO indoors for family shots for example.

Alternatively, you could buy a K-01 and get the high ISO performance of a K-5 for indoor use (not to mention the superb focus peaking for manual focus lenses) whilst keeping the K-7 for low ISO work. The K-01 is available for silly prices right now.

Regards
David

I honestly have no idea! I was only offering some advice based on what works for me, I like to use manual flashes because they offer so much control. I can't see the point in spending hundreds of pounds when a manual flash will give better results.

I'm speaking of course from the point of view of using flash occasionally for amateur purposes, I'm not trying to imply that cheap manual flashes will produce better results than a proper studio setup.

Regards
David

Thanks very much Nigel. I doubt that Pentax will get noticed very much, if at all!! I suppose I could have mentioned it more in the write up for the image, but I never thought about this.

Regards
David

Buy a cheap, good quality manual flash like the Youngnuo or similar, you can get decent ones for £30 upwards. It's much easier to dial in the power you need to get just the right amount of fill-in flash.

I have a TTL Metz and it never gets used because I can't balance the flash output satisfactorily. Also it's not as powerful as my manual ones (Neewer TTL560, Amazon £26 each). The cheap manual ones produce far better results for me.

Regards
David

It is optically identical, just like the DA L 18-55 is optically identical to the DA 18-55WR. Coatings, glass and optical arrangement are exactly the same.

I've never used the quickshift on any of my lenses! It is probably more use on the 55-300 than most of the others, but having said that I find the focussing is excellent on the newer K-5II bodies and I can't say I feel the need for quickshift with mine. Regarding the hood, they cost about £4 from ebay for a Chinese copy that does exactly the same job as the Pentax ones.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from buying the DA version as this one is better for having the features the DA L doesn't, but it will make no difference to the image quality.

Regards
David

I agree, they are quite soft. I had a 50-500 that was soft at anything longer than 150mm; I swapped it for a 150-500 and this is very sharp. The last image above looks quite similar to the type of shots my lens produced; it has a slight halo around bright objects.

It's worth trying what Steve has suggested as I've read a lot of good reviews on this lens and it should be capable of taking good, sharp images.

Regards
David

Hi Ben, you already have a Forum thread open on the same subject which I posted a reply on yesterday. It's probably best not to have two different threads running on the same subject!

The 55-300 is the best lens in its class and worth spending more to obtain. You might want to have a look at the DA L version with a plastic lens mount and no 'quick shift' focussing; this is a good deal cheaper and is identical optically to the DA version. There's no need to worry about a plastic mount, they are robust and wear well.

Regards
David