I'll reserve judgement Philip for now. At the moment I don't actually have an opinion and I don't know if I would buy a II or IIs.

I do know I would buy either a K-5 or K-5 II quite happily, if that was the choice.

As for image size and viewing distance, as we already know the two are inter-related. Personally I could tell the difference between a small 6x4 inch print printed at 150ppi and one printed at 300ppi (that is, printed from an image of that resolution). Not everybody could. The larger the print, the greater the possible viewing distance and the lower the possible resolution.

This should not be confused with the dpi of a printer output, which is something else again.

Thanks Philip!

Philip, I could tell from the thumbnails!

My spectacles are Carl Zeiss Umbramatic.....

I guess the lenses these days are so complex that wear and tear might well eventually mean a reduction in quality. Especially the mechanisms moving reoups of elements independently and the AF systems.

A good and easy method of testing is to mount newspapers on a flat wall and, using a tripod and aligning carefully, taking a series of tests shots at various apertures and perhaps focusing distances too..

I recall the magazine tests were very favourable when it was launched. It was said to be better than the 18-250mm, which we know to be an excellent travel lens.

I've just refreshed my memory of the DPReview images, and the IIs shot looks crisper.

Algernon's images show the bottom shot looking crisper.

Nothing wrong with them that I can see.

OK, I'll try to answer that. The essential bit is the actual usage and the evaluation of what's going on with a camera. The images provided on EPZ are excellent in that you get the full sized, untouched originals of every shot, so you can take them away and find out for yourself. Try it with the K-5 II ones if you wish to.

The problem I see is that a web-sized image in itself is unlikely to show the subtle differences properly, so it's not a basis in itself for being negative or positive. The other problem I perceive is that theory had many trashing the Q, but now we have quite an assortment of very happy Q users, so there is a sense in which sometimes we can be a bit quick to reject some idea, before we see how it actually pans out.

Hope that answers the query.

To be honest, that's up to the reader to decide, all I can say is that I give a straightforward and honest appraisal of what I observe. All credit to EPZ that not one word gets changed or left out, much better than some magazines.

We all have our favourite reviewers, those we trust to be sensible, and then again those who we feel miss the point.

Maybe people find it hard to accept that Nikon and Pentax are deluding themselves by offering variants with no AA filter?

As far as I'm concerned I expect that they have enought comptence to sort this out and it's more a matter of quantifyiing the difference for different applications. This will hopefully help people to decide whether the extra outlay is necessary for them.

As I take quite a lot of people pictures, received knowledge suggests that the K-5 IIs could be too harsh for that purpose. I look foward to finding out for myself.

If you read the rather convoluted sentence carefully, especiually noting the semi-colon, what it is saying is that the AA filter reduces detail resolution, which we know it does. It then explains that the K-5 IIs is the perfect choice, etc.

Both statements as written are correct.