Oh yes, many times among the crowd at airshows and same feelings like you Rob, but, I don't really do long series of photos, and I don't care that much about it (one exclusion below), I know there are people who can make a 20 shots out of one low-pass, but... I prefer to take a pic at the right time, not just trying to catch everything just to choose one pic, this leads to some missed situations, but I prefer the old-fashioned way . Other side of the problem is, even if K20D would be able to take a 6 pic a sec, AF-C wouldn't be fast enough to keep up, honestly when I shot airplanes, I have a habit of taking 2-3 photos in a row, just to pick up the one where AF was nearest to the spot.
It is not a grumbling about the Pentax AF, it is not something that would prevent one from taking a good pictures, people were able to take pics with manual focusing in the past, so why AF would have to be so crucial now .
In comparison to other similar level DSLR's, I would say K20D plus a very good lens has very good image quality, but it is slower, and sometimes it is harder to take a very fine pic with it when doing dynamic stuff (but not impossible), it will be frustrating when you miss a chance for good pic just because camera's AF was too slow to focus, it may be frustrating to the user when standing next to faster cameras (till recently the sound of "screwdriver" AF was embarrassing enough ), but at the end of the day what counts is how good the photos are.
K7 is faster, probably you would have to wait some months before the price would drop, however, with current prices increase hard to say how it will look like...
PS ah yes, and Pentax camera strap looks much better than C .

I find the way Jessops advices quite funny, at my local branch staff wears t-shirs with N logo on, I see these people getting in, speaking to the staff, looking at this logo and asking what would be the best camera .
Aside, this branch has at least two people I'm aware of, who know a lot about photography and have wider view not just C&N.

[IMG]http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/6028/pentaxuserraw3.jpg[/IMG]

UFRaw + Gimp. UFRaw: a bit of exposure decrease, curves. Gimp: bit more curves, crop, save.

But again, it is not about the number of 2^24 (16 something milions).
When working on an 24 bit pic (8 bit per channel), operations like levels, curves, etc operate on 8 bits data (channel), what gives max of 256 possible values, so as we can imagine i.e. streching levels will lead to significant gaps in the histogram - that is the way to posterization.

Amin, but don't force him to the P. If later he decides to go for some other N, C, S, O, F just let him go hehehe.
Very nice shots .

(aside) If I remember correctly K10D actually saves RAWs in 12bits, not sure about K20D. Not sure also how it converts longer data to a 12/14 bits (simple truncate or something else).

And all that is explained in the link I posted above, as well as info that DPI field in exim means nothing, and surely has nothing to the camera resolution.

Yes it is in exif - as a DPI, and has nothing to do with the resolution of the camera, it is just a value 72 set-up for this field, nothing else.. To save my typing it, it has been well explained here:
http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/post-processing-printing-software/55998-72-dp...

No no, camera doesnt't take pictures at 72 PPI or other PPI value.
You take the number of pixels camera produce, relate it to the (Desired) printout size and get resolution.

petemasty
Are you sure it is "72 pixels per centimetre" not 72 DPI (dots per inch) ?, in the latter don't worry about it, it has nothing to do with the quality/resolution of picture taken by the camera.

Yes, but you will not be able to see it on a poor monitor .
Doing bigger prints may benefit (no/less signs of colour banding in final image due to 16 bit operations).
What is worse, quite a lot of LCD monitors that use TN pannels (beside the fact that TN is completely useless for colour work) are using 6 bit LUT for intenal gamma correction. So people try to "calibrate" them - what on these TN pannels is quite random anyway, and get nasty banding constrained by the 6 (sometimes 8 ) bit monitor's LUT.