Without a doubt. K20 to K7, not really. KanythingolderthanK5 to K5 no brainer. K5 to KanythingnewerthanK5 debatable. Go for it.

I agree. The IQ of the new Q7 looks significantly better and with the wider effective focal length the 01 prime might just negate the need for a wider angle. But the Q looks and feels much better and I'm a bit miffed that Pentax hoodwinked customers over the wide angle, so I won't be upgrading to a Q7. They can attach the ridiculous mount cap lens where the sun doesn't shine.

As long as the QC (ie: no sensor stain type issues) is better then equivalent sales will mean much better profits. I'm sure Pentax have a winner here. The K5 won its plaudits but the K3 is headline news and the marketing behind it is more savvy. Go Pentax go.

I agree, well deserved.

In a word yes. We are a probably still a long way off from its commercialisation. But graphene is a wonder material destined to find its way into pretty much everything. There is likely to be a Graphene Age as revolutionary as plastics and more so than silicon.

Back in the day, photographers owned a small handful of primes. Some of them only ever used one focal length. But of course they were hopeless. Imagine how good Henri Cartier-Bresson would have been if he'd have swapped his 50mm for a proper zoom lens.

You are clearly going to be more confortable with zooms. Generally I prefer primes for various reasons. I like the fact they are compact, they just feel better on the camera to me. I can use them with a small tripod when I wish to have that convenience, with a gorillapod (great around town). A large zoom requires a large tripod, especially in portrait format. I find them easier to get to know to utilise their strengths and understand their weaknesses. I often like to use shallow depth of field, shallower than is often available with a zoom. There are of course plenty of situations where a zoom might be preferable. I currently prefer a wide zoom for landscape.

However, your primes are cheap so you may as well hang on to them. I agree you don't want to be swapping lenses when M42 adaptors are involved. It would be better to go out with either Kmount primes or M42primes. And just for fun, once in a while just go out with one of them attached to the camera. Then that restricts your decision making to simply thinking about what to photograph it, not how to photograph it. And you might find that you become attuned to that focal length and that way of seeing. Or maybe not. Just go with your instinct.

I get you. There aren't any raw files available yet, I don't think so anyway. Doing it as on onscreen exercise in Lightroom I'd say it is very close and in line with what Pentaxophile has done with the resizing. I'd say pixel peeping the K5 possibly has a slight edge - just slightly smoother transitions, but I wouldn't be confident in that without a side by side raw shoot of an identical scene. I think too close to call is the outcome for all practical purposes.

But you can do that with the K3. Or you could buy new lenses but not made by Pentax. I think it would give the FA Ltds a raison d'etre and they are asking a few bob for them these days. They could leave the mount crippled to discourage manuals.

No I don't see how I could do that. The above are just unresized 800 pixels width. For me it just proves that the D600 (unsurprisingly) handles noise better than the K3, and therefore I disagree somewhat with the reviewer. It certainly isn't worth considering changing systems for though, no way. But also from my point of view upgrading from the K5 will not lead to any noticeable improvement in IQ. The K3 will make a lot of sense to a lot of people but for me it does fall short of the one thing that I was hoping for. I've read the endless discussions about whether or not an AA filter makes a difference and there will be endless discussions about the K3 vs this and that. The next best thing is always tempting but I've now seen enough to personally conclude that the K5 is still there punching above its weight. Pentax will have to wait a while for more of my money but on this evidence they will get it in a year or two when the quantum leap in iq from the K5 arrives.

That's true. The point for me is that the K5 is three years old but can still easily (at least) hold its own for pure image quality against almost certainly the finest APSC camera ever made. The K3 has other advantages of course and it looks fantastic, but I want my next upgrade to give me cleaner images, cleaner than those from the D600 and I'm very much looking forward to how 24mp from Pentax performs on a larger sensor when that comes. In the meantime its good to now that the K5 can outperform my abilities so I'm happy to carry on figuring out how to get the best out of it for some time yet.