I have both the K3 and the KP and have used them both recently. For the most part I don't notice any noise in PP (I use Lightroom 6). Occasionally when I have a problem with dynamic range, especially in the early morning when I want to get a good sky, but to do that the wooded area beneath becomes totally dark, so I use the "shadow" feature to bring the woods back and it brings some noise with it. But when the light isn't very challenging I don't get any noise from either one of them. But I try not to go above 1600 so that might make a difference.

Then too, I most always shoot in the manual mode. I have played around with the TAv mode (because urged to do so by some forum members) and gotten some noise with some of the TAv constructs but then perhaps I didn't do better because my heart wasn't in it.

Lawrence

It wouldn't have been easy. Perhaps two or three miles south of this point is a Stater Brothers grocery store. They don't have shopping trolley guards so anyone can push one away. There are no sidewalks so the Troll (my non-political correct term for these people some of which liver under bridges) would have to push his trolley on the paved road until he gets to the river. He probably pushes it along the south levee until he gets to a spot where he wants to get down into the river bottom. There is no easy way to get a cart down as far as I can recall. He would have to horse it down as he steps on large rocks to make his way down. Maybe he empties his cart first, takes it down to the bottom and then goes back up after the shopping bags. I've never seen this done, but I have seen empty carts on the south levee where the troll grabbed his bags of groceries and left the cart behind.

There are places where homeless people push shopping carts about with all their worldly possessions, but I haven't seen any such at the river. and it wouldn't be easy to push a cart many places on the river bottom because of the soft sand.

Lawrence

Risking failure to say it, I haven't had a camera fail on me in ages, but I did put my K-70 away the other day and used the K3 on my last hike. Living in one of the less populated regions of California I hike (and take photos) in a somewhat rugged area and got to a point where I felt I was risking damage to the fragile-seeming K-70.

As Mr. Riley said, Pentax has a lot of lenses. I have quite a few myself and intended to take perhaps the 15mm and 70mm primes on the hike, but then checking the weather report and reading that "drizzle" was a possibility I went with the 18-135mm.

I had been checking the K-70 in higher ISO ranges than I used with my other cameras. On the last K-70 outing I left it at ISO 1600 for the entire outing. Previously at ISO 3200 I got a slight bit of noise on a couple of shots, but (I thought) if I can leave a camera at ISO 1600 in the early morning on a dark drizzly day then I am doing pretty good. So on my first hike in a long time with the K3 I left it at 1600 to see how it would compare. The days and lighting were perhaps slightly worse than the K-70 outing, and I ended up thinking that the K3 did better.

Here is the gallery for the hike yesterday: https://lawrencehelm.smugmug.com/RiverPhotography/Jun-2017/

A caveat: The day was so overcast with haze that I was afraid none of the shots were going to be keepers. The shots when I looked at them in Light Room looked under-exposed but I was able to bring out the details in Lightroom without introducing any noise. I had to do the same thing with the K-70 shots on such days, but yesterday was worse than any I'd used the K-70 on. I was using the Lightroom 6 editor and did little more than increase the contrast and darken the shots a bit. All of the detail must have been in the raw file, and while I don't understand how that works, I'll take it.

This was my favorite shot: https://lawrencehelm.smugmug.com/RiverPhotography/Jun-2017/i-2J27Z3d/A

Were all of these shots completely natural and exactly what I saw on the hike? I don't know. I am old and have weak eyes -- but close enough.

Lawrence

Hardgravity,

I checked your web site to see if it described why your K-5 had failed -- you hadn't described that but you did refer to your Pentax collection.

In my case, I might be said to have "collected" Olympus digital cameras in that I had most of them. Then when Olympus quit making them I bought a used K-20D on line from a store that had several. The AF wasn't functioning properly so I sent it back. The next one they sent me had no serial number but worked fine.

My next Pentax was a K7, purchased from a Canadian outfit with less of a warranty than if I had bought it in the US. Within days of when the warranty ran out; so did the K7. The AF went out on that one as well. I could use it with manual focus and did so for a short while. Deciding I was going to stick with Pentax from that time forward I bought a new K5 and sent my K7 to the shop to be fixed.

For a while the K5 was my favorite camera -- the best camera I'd ever owned, but since I bought a K5iis, a K3 and the a K3ii I gave my K5 to my son. I had previously given him the K20D followed by the K7. Each time he would say the camera was the best he had owned and quit using the previous one.

Considering my problems buying used Olympus cameras and then the used K-20D and the slightly questionable K-7, my own conclusion has been to stay away (as much as possible) from used cameras. I have never had a problem with any of my Pentax cameras from the K5 forward.

The last used camera I bought was an Olympus E5. The seller said it was in "near new" condition. Indeed when I got it I had to agree. It looked nearly new. But when I checked the shutter count it had about 30,000 clicks on it. I decided not to quibble with him but to keep the camera. He could argue that for a camera built as well as the E5, 30,000 clicks on this camera predicted to provide 200,000 was "nearly" new. I wouldn't be putting a huge number of shutter actuations on it and it did look very good so okay, I had wanted the E-5 before I totally left Olympus and I had one. I also had one more reason never to buy another used camera.

Of course I had been sticking with the Pentax "flagship" APS/C cameras. Recently, hearing good things about the second tier cameras, I bought a K-S1. It functions properly but it doesn't have two dials and I shoot in manual mode & so need them. I bought the K-S2 which I thought had a problem but it turned out a couple of lenses were faulty -- after I sent the K-S2 back. More recently I bought a K-70. I've tried it with several different lenses and it has worked well. However, after my last outing with the K-70 and 16-85mm lens I've decided that I prefer the solidity of the top tier cameras; so I'm expecting to use the K-70 less in the future.

I had been using the K3ii since I got it, but rather than go strictly back to it after setting the K-70 on the shelf, I'll probably switch off with the K-3 and K-5iis -- and maybe my "near-new" E-5 as well. I'm not sorry I bought the K-70, but just don't think it has the hiking-camera sturdiness that these others have.

Lawrence

Intergerspin,

Now you must tell us if it is the K-5ii you told us about earlier, the one with 66,000 clicks on it -- so we can commiserate properly later on should it fail.

Lawrence

W. V. Barnes,

Hmm. I have often wondered about the expression "retired person on a limited income." I think of myself in those terms. I will be 83 this coming October and my income is "limited" in the sense that it isn't going to go up, but my mortgage payment is low. My Jeep and everything else is paid for. I don't have any expensive hobbies other than photography, computers, and dogs. Oh yes, children who while their incomes are not "limited" seem always to be in need.

In my case I do a lot of hiking & that is probably the reason I am still in good shape at my age. And while I could afford and would have the strength to carry a K-1 on a hike, that has never seemed very practical to me and I haven't seriously considered it. But who knows? If the price dropped and I was looking for something a little different to spice up the terrain I usually hike in, I might get a K-1 at some future time.

One needs to consider motives -- at least I try to consider mine. I have a bit of a photographer's eye and a bit of an artistic bent so I have taken and can appreciate an excellent or artistic shot. Will a K-1 do something for me along those lines that my K3, K3ii or K70 will not? I think the answer must be no. I'm a retired Engineer and see the DSLR as a mature system, much as the laptop or automobile. We can expect repackaging, moving things about, making things larger or smaller, but we probably won't see quantum leaps. Oh they could happen. To have a battery operated car with a range of 5,000 miles would be a quantum leap in my opinion, but I can't think of anything equivalent in the DSLR. The MILC hoped it was going to be a quantum leap but thus far it doesn't do anything significantly better than the DSLR.

& so back to the OP's question, if one has a camera that one is extremely fond of and discovers that one is taking it out on outing after outing, that doesn't mean that one's other cameras sitting back home in the closet are going bad. A battery could go bad after a very long period of time, and I do take batteries out of cameras I suspect I won't use in the near future. I suppose if you need the money you might need to sell gear, but as in my case if you don't and you have the room in your closet, why not keep your old K3 or K5iis there nice and cozy?

I mentioned in another thread that when I heard the rumor that Ricoh might discontinue the DSLR, I dug out one of my old combinations, the Olympus E5 and Zuiko 12-60 lens and took them on a couple of hikes. I was very favorably impressed with the results, but since the DSLR at some point in time (IMO prior to the production of the E5 and 12-60) became mature, there was no reason for me to suspect that the photos on these outings would be bad. And indeed I was so impressed I wished I could go right on using this combination, but I thought that Ricoh in saying they were going to concentrate on "high value" cameras might be planning to discontinue the K-70 & so bought one right away & have been using it instead of the Olympus E5.

Here is the folder I've mentioned. The first two hikes are with the discontinued but still serviceable Olympus E5 and equally discontinued but serviceable 12-60 mm lens. https://lawrencehelm.smugmug.com/RiverPhotography/Apr-2017/

You can see, unless my old eyes are deceiving themselves that this "obsolete" combination is still capable of producing photos worth keeping. This will be true of all the K5's, K5iis, K3s and K3iis being sold and replaced by KPs & K1s. If you get a KP or K1 you "might" get something you need, but most of us would have to admit that we won't. The photos we take with our old E5s or K5s will be just as satisfying as the ones we might take with a K1, but maybe we aren't looking for superior performance. Maybe we are looking for the equivalent of that "new car smell." I know I'm guilty of that. I love the feel and build of the K-70 I got the other day. I have been playing with higher ISO settings that I would not normally use on a hike as you could see in the outings after the E5 outings, but I'm probably going to go back to shooting at ISO 400 and at the most extreme on a dark morning under the trees, ISO 800. Maaaabeee I'll use ISO 1600 on occasion. Thus, the "improvement" I was experimenting with, extremely high ISO for hiking on dark mornings, hasn't really panned out for me. Does that mean I'll get rid of my K-70???? Well, no. It still smells like a new car.

Glad to see you running your Vizslas off leash. You can see Ben, a male Rhodesian Ridgeback in my shots -- a former show dog who is 120 pounds. The medium sized dog is a one-year-old Irish Terrier named Jessica. The smallest, a Schnoodle named Duffy, was acquired as a lapdog by my wife whom I lost a couple of years ago. He weighs just 23.5 pounds but enjoys a hike as much as a real dog.

Lawrence

1500 clicks in two hours, impressive!

I got a K-70 recently. I do a lot of hiking in the early morning (Summer days and even Spring & Autumn days get hot early here in San Jacinto, California) in the lee of a mountain. I enjoy trying different cameras and lenses for different effects. I had been using the K3ii but decided to try the lighter K-70 with its improved low-light capability since early mornings in the lee of a mountain tend to be darkish. Thus, I was taking a lot of shots on my first few times out partly to make sure the camera was okay or if it wasn't to give me time to send it back, but (since it seems okay thus far) checking out its low-light capability in my real-life situation as well as checking it out with some different lenses and situations to see how it would feel to use regularly.

When I got home and checked the results in Light Room, I averaged about 100 clicks per outing. Mind you I'm an old fellow, going on 83; so a day hike is good enough for me nowadays, but if I don't over do things I might make three day-hikes a week. So 300 clicks on a good week?

Do I need good quality gear for such limited usage? I recall starting out on a hike years ago only to discover there was something wrong with my camera. Nowadays I am in the habit of checking things before I head off with the dogs, but it is worth it to me to pay more & buy new just to avoid something happening to my gear on a hike. Also, it is worth having lots of backups in case a camera malfunctions and I have to send it in for repair. Also, it is worth it to me to be able to look through different lenses and, later, to look at their effects in light Room -- having a bit of an artistic bent despite an engineering background.

When the rumor began about Ricoh perhaps discontinuing its Pentax DSLR line, I got out my old Olympus E-5 and 12-60 Zuiko lens to "feel" what it would be like to have just old stuff. You can see shots from the E-5 and 12-60 in my first two hikes in the April 2017 folder: https://lawrencehelm.smugmug.com/RiverPhotography/Apr-2017/ Subsequent hikes in this folder were for checking out the K-70, but for me it was reassuring to see that the E-5 could still perform. Or perhaps I should better say that it was encouraging to discover it could perform as well as more modern cameras and (with the 12-60) lenses. I have no wish to put huge shutter-click numbers on any given camera. In fact I hope I don't. I would rather spread them out so that I can switch from one to another as it suits me, to see through the eyes of different lenses, to feel the heft, see through the view-finder, and hear the click of different shutters.

Not many of you (perhaps) would do what I do, but not many of you (probably) are as old as I am.

Lawrence

Quite right. There are a lot of variables. I did through costly trial and error become fairly good at picking out used cameras. I recall buying an Olympus E520 offered by a fellow who had received it as a gift but never used it. This camera was truly is pristine condition. I got a few others with less than 1,000 clicks and these proved very reliable as well. Cameras with high usage never turned out so well for me. If a previous owner has only used a camera for 1,000 clicks then he has had very little time to screw it up.

Lawrence

It wouldn't scare me if I'd put the 60K on the camera, but I'd occasion to buy several high-shutter count cameras in my Olympus DSLR days and invariably the high shutter count meant hard usage. These cameras were invariably disappointments. Even the Olympus E1 which was built so well is was thought to be immortal developed problems when the shutter count was high: cracked covers, loose material, heavily scratched bottoms from tripod use, dust inside that seemed impervious to removal. I was bent upon getting an excellent copy & so bought several (most of which my son now has -- I kept two). It seems that many sellers lie (I know this will be hard to believe) about the condition of the used cameras they are trying to sell.

As to taking comfort in the life-expectancy estimates of K5, K5ii, etc cameras, these are just estimates. Pentax has not tested these cameras to destruction. You can find sites where people report how long their various cameras have lasted before failure. Even cameras that are "estimated" to have a life expectancy of 100,000 shutter clicks or more are reported to have failed at 30,000 or so clicks; which isn't to say that others don't make the 100,000 number, but many don't. Other cheaper models not expected to last 100,000 clicks have been reported to last more than 200,000 clicks. There are so many variables involved. If you know you have babied your camera, never dropped it, never left it in a hot car and never spilled water on it you won't be surprised if your camera lasts 100,000 clicks. On the other hand if someone tries to sell you a K5ii with 66,000 clicks on it, will you be confident that he has treated this camera with the sort of care it would take to make sure it will last you 34,000 clicks more? Or is something starting to fail that you aren't likely to discover until you've had the camera a few months -- too many months to return it?

Lawrence

Stu,
Was your K5 new? As it happens the only new Pentax camera I thought was defective probably wasn't. I bought a new K-S2 at the same time I bought a new 55-300PLM and a used 16-45 planning a relatively lightweight kit for lightweight hikes. Nothing worked right. Neither lens would focus automatically with reliability. Since the shop that sold me the K-S2 gave me 30 days to return it before I'd have to go to warranty and return it to Pentax, I returned the K-S2, thinking it unlikely that both lenses could be bad. Then I tried the 55-300PLM and 16-45 with my K3ii a camera I had been using for some time and the lenses malfunctioned on that camera as well.

I returned the 55-300PLM and the 16-45. I got a better 16-45 from another seller but decided to stick with my earlier version of the 55-300. Most of my shooting is below 55mm anyway.

But my point is (if I have one) that if you get a new camera or lens and then use the heck out of it in the first couple of weeks, you'll probably know if you have a defective copy. I also don't like to get a new item as soon as it comes out -- as I did with the 55-PLM. There are often bugs that will have been corrected in future copies.

I used my K5 for quite a long time and then gave it to my son. He now has the K-20D, the K-7 and the K-5, all of which work flawlessly, but the K-5 is now his favorite.

Lawrence