Nice natural feel, but tripod, tripod, tripod.

It's probably the combination of unusually built bridge and diverging verticals from angling the camera downwards that make it look odd. Excellent basic composition though.

By the same token you could argue that some people with DSLRs should downgrade to a point and shoot.

Its seems very sensible to me to continue with the K5II and s variant but to discontinue the K5. The K5II will surely hold it's own for a good year or two more.

I don't get on with FB but have just discovered the addition of a photography page (just about to set my own up), when it's focused like that it's excellent. I'll take a look.

I have scrutinised the K3 first images and first impressions are that that you would not be able to distinguish the quality of those images from similar, well taken images with the K5. It just goes to show how good the K5 is and it will remain so for a long time yet. Those are only first images and maybe not based on final release firmware, but even so Pentax have the confidence to release them (even though one in particular is of an unacceptable standard imo). I was hoping for some innovation with the K3 which would mean some leap in image quality, but
I think that improvements in that area are becoming less and less incremental, it seems to be pretty much at the plateau now across all manufacturers. Additional pixels can be handy things but the landscape/static object photographer shouldn't really need the extra cropping ability that they bring. In fact out of curiosity I've just looked at one of the few A4 prints that I have made - it looks great, sharp detail, smooth transitions, etc and it was from a 3.8megapixel file from a ten year old camera. So I would imagine 16mp is plenty enough for a pretty large print.

The fair comparison is what it will cost you when you wish to buy one, which is 'soon'.

We have still really to see images from K3 to make a properly informed judgement, particularly for high iso. In terms of landscape and static subjects then my guess is that pretty much any of the current Pentax range will do a similarly excellent job in terms of pure 'image quality'. The differences are in the other onboard tools that you may use to help you get the shot. The K3 looks a very worthy top spec APSC model but if the latest AF and burst shooting are irrelevant to your needs then you might be paying for functionality you won't use.

Interesting examples. I have quite similar examples to the first and fifth shots. With the first the image quality is pretty much up to what I would expect to achieve with the K5 and my favourite lenses around that focal length, although I don't have a 16-50 to judge it against. The fifth struck me as more interesting. The detail on the beak is again pretty much I get from the K5 and DA300. Here are comparable crops from the background. The K3 is a camera processed JPEG and the K5 is raw through Lightroom with sharpening of 25 and no noise reduction:








Obviously completely unscientific and the only proper way to judge is by all things being equal. However I have drawn my own initial conclusions.

Take a look at the gallery in the colour balance in the landscape feature article, particularly the night shots such as this. The clean detail in the sky is gorgeous, I haven't seen anything in APSC that can hold a candle to that.

It depends what is meant by very expensive. The Nikon D600 is £1361, the Canon 6D a little more. To some that is unaffordable full frame, to others the difference from the K3 is less than the cost of a decent lens. It would be nice to have that kind of choice with Pentax.