I, for one, research extensively before any expensive purchase. Very frustrating of course for salesmen who try to change my mind about what I'm buying. Sorry mate, your 5 mins sales pitch is never going to trump my several hours (at least, sometimes days) of research.

Maybe she just had a good taste. At a barbecue recently for a friends birthday a girl I hadn't met before with a Canon (450D I think) asked for a shot of my K-5. Not sure what impressed her so much as she only took a couple of shots with it but she looked a tad jealous and commented "Wow, you can tell this is a really quality camera."

Photographing a recent roller derby event there were 3 Pentax photographers there. Myself, another K-5 user and IIRC a K20D user.

See, here's what I'm talking about. I was browsing through a flickr group for 'deliberate motion blur':

http://www.flickr.com/groups/deliberatemotionblur/

Now to me the great majority of these pictures just seem 'blah', even those which have attracted very positive comments from other users. There are exceptions of course but to my eye most of them just don't seem to work. Blurry street photography in particular is really not my thing. If I came across something similar to some of these from one of my own shoots I would take a look at the exif to find out what went wrong then delete it.

Yeah, I know you were being a bit lighthearted, just expressing my opinion anyway. In any case I was really talking about motion blur in the context of the existing conversation, i.e. the kind you would get if you slowed the shutter speed sufficiently to slow the continuous shooting frame rate. Presumably you would have to be shooting at something slower than 1/10s to 'achieve' this. In other words the kind of gross motion blur which affects whole subjects, not parts of them like the propeller of a plane, the wheels of a bike or the feet of a runner. If I objected to that I'd be trying to shoot everything at 1/8000s.

I only really mentioned it because examples of gross motion blur which others sometimes consider 'artistic' are often lost on me to be honest. This may be my failing but OTOH it could be just one of any number of conflicting but equally valid opinions.

Not a big fan of motion blur, to be honest. Nine times out of ten, even when it's intentional, it looks a bit rubbish to me. There are exceptions, including some highly notable and genuinely creative ones, of course.

A fair point, but then they really should have compared the AF on the K-30 to one of those other entry level bodies.

Slowing the frame rate by slowing the shutter speed will work, but isn't too useful if you're looking to freeze motion, which is usually the point with continuous shooting - I mean why would you be using continuous shooting in the first place if you weren't photographing moving targets?

APS-C lenses would almost certainly vignette with this setup. Don't forget that the area covered by a lens is generally circular, the 'image circle'. A square or rectangular sensor has to fit within the circle. If you simply make it square based on the longest side of the ASP-C sensor, you're going to end up with a diagonal that's greater than the diameter of the circle. You'll therefore have vignetted or worse 'chopped' corners.

If you can't visualise it then draw a circle and draw a rectangle inside it, such that the corners of the rectangle just touch the circumference of the circle. Then draw a square whose sides are the same length as the longest side of the rectangle. You'll see that the corners are of course protruding outside of the circle.

It might work with some lenses but I seriously doubt it would work with the likes of standard kit lenses, lenses like the 55-300 or anything in the ultra-wide focal range (ultra-wides being already configured to get the greatest possible angle of view within the limits of the image circle available).

Edit: Sorry didn't notice Pentaxophile already covered this ground. Don't mean to step on anyone's toes!

Thanks for the responses. What I'd really like to know though is has anybody noticed any particular difference in AF performance, or ease of manual focusing? (I will use both AF for non-marco and MF for macro use.)