No, you don't need to spend that much.

There are few people who would describe a 50mm lens as being too long for portraits. The Pentax 55mm f1.4 lens is a traditional portrait lens, albeit a little pricy. The 50mm f1.8 should be ideal for about £239.00

If you really find 50mm too long for your style of photography, then the inexpensive 35mm f2.4 is a fine lens, price around £150.00

You can check out completed listings on eBay. Recent K20D bodies went around £250.

Metering technique, angle of view, metering pattern, all have a part to play. Different marques have a different reference point as well. Some use am 18% grey as the average, some use 10% grey, and no doubt others vary in their own particular ways.

Having said that, transmission should not be much of an issue between lenses, not in this day of high-tech coatings, but there could be expected variation of maybe 0.5 stop. Two stops would cause some concern and I would start to look into why that was.

I have modified th e-mail address to avoid spamming.

I think it depends more on the image content Don. The K-5 and K-5 II seem equally good to me.

No, no need for that. It's because you have the camera set to D-Range Highlight Correction.

This means the minimum sensitivity is ISO200 in the normal range and ISO160 in the expanded range.

Turn that off and you will have the full range of sensitivity available again.

I have just picked up a K-5 and set in Av there is no problem setting ISO100 and there shouldn't be because it's part of the standard range.

Some other models start at ISO200, but not the K-5.

I have no idea why you should experience this particular problem as it's not obvious how it could be done. Very mysterious.

Following on from the review of the K-5 II, here are a couple of digital filter effects from the test images, this time finished off in Photoshop:




The above two are Soft and Extract Colour.


A texture picture to see how the 18-55mm WR lens performed.


A portrait shot. I don't usually use Bright as my picture style and generally prefer Natural, but the overcast conditions meant it was not too severe.

It depends what you mean by "normal settings" - if you could be more specific as to what those settings might be it could reveal the answer.

You can set ISO100 and if you activate the extended range you can go as low as ISO80.