Sorry Mac, the cheapest way to get a camera with this sensor is a K-01, there's a lot wrong about the K-01, it looks and handles like a brick, you have to grip it to hold it, you discover muscles in your hand you never knew you you had.

There's no viewfinder only a rear screen which can be impossible to see in bright sunlight, holding the camera at arm's length to see the screen is not the best for camera stability etc. etc., but the image quality is every bit as good as the K5.

Along with other mirrorless cameras it has some good points too.

Old manual focus lenses work well with the K-01, focus peaking highlights the part of the image that is in focus, it's quick and easy to use - if you can see the screen.

Fix an old K mount bellows and a 50mm lens and you have a virtually perfect bug hunting kit, especially if you use flash to 'freeze' the exposure in 1/1000th of a second or faster, even the flash can be a cheap manual one as once you have the correct exposure the shallow DOF means that the camera and flash are always the same distance from the subject, you focus by moving the whole contraption backwards and forwards using the focus peaking and when the part of the subject you want is in focus you press the shutter release, every shot is a winner.

Fix it to a telescope and you have a perfect birding or Astro photography setup.

I paid £235 for my K-01 body only, a real bargain as image quality really is right up there with the best cameras, build quality is good, it looks like it's made from a machined solid block of aluminium.

The game changer for image quality was the K5 and subsequent models. The Sony Exmor sensor really is an improvement over earlier sensors, wider dynamic range, much lower noise even in low light.

It's a game changer because of the low noise, this means you can use smaller aperture lenses (cheaper) in low light, the K5 is virtually noise free at 1600 ISO which means you can up the ISO to get reasonable shutter speeds in low light situations, or when you want to increase shutter speed, when using a telephoto lens in less than ideal lighting such as this shot taken with an ISO of 3200 which enabled the 1/125th shutter speed in shadow conditions at f9 so even a cheap Sigma 70 - 300 lens bought off eBay for £36.00 performs well.

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Botanical_Gdns_0199 by Chris_Judge, on Flickr].

The Pentax K30 and the K-01 both use the same sensor.

The speed at which Pentax cameras take bracketed shots enable 3 frames to be taken usually within a second, moving subjects are fair game for HDR.

[

Whitby_Mar_11_b by Chris_Judge, on Flickr]

Shot during a gale, his robes were all over the place, the sea was in a frenzy and I was almost blown over.

Even a humble Pentax Q can get shots like this easily.

Auto focus speed was one limitation for sports photographers, it remains to be seen if the new Safox offers fast enough auto focus. The frames per second at over 8 is certainly fast enough in the K3, but that depends on fast shutter speeds.

A lot of sports is in relatively dimly lit arenas so wide aperture is needed for fast action in dim lighting. The cameras can cope, but there are no wide aperture telephoto zooms in the Pentax range, you have to go to Sigma for their 70 - 200mm f2.8.

The K5 was (is) the game changer, lower noise, wide dynamic range, the difference will be visible.

My K5 Flickr set.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris-judge/sets/72157634528924459/

If it follows Pentax model naming convention any FF DSLR will be an 'A...' model.

'K' = King
'Q' = Queen
'A' would be Ace

Chris

According to one Japanese contact it will be the same APS sized 16.3Mb sensor, the same as on all recent Pentax DSLR and one mirrorless, (why fix what's not broken?), it will have no AA filter, but it will have one in software should you get Moire in an image, it will be USB3, it will have a headphone socket for when recording video, and, maybe, a small manual volume control, it will have a faster frame rate probably 8.5fps, and a better, but still fixed, rear screen.

Hope they are wrong

So true.

Lower ISO can be as noisy as a high ISO (higher than the noise you get at 800 or even 1600 on my K5) which is why it's in the extended ISO range, there's an optimum setting for ISO vs noise which varies from sensor to sensor, minimum noise is not at 100 or even 200 with most sensors.

The ND filters in the Q lenses is so that you can use a wide aperture (to minimise DOF) in bright Sunlight as it's minimum ISO is 125 and it's fastest shutter speed is 1/2000th of a second.

For the opposite reason (increasing DOF in bright light with flash) you can use ND filters for that too.

http://strobist.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/using-nd-filters-to-kill-depth-of-field.h...

Though as the Q can sync at 1/1000th of a second it's less necessary for this.

I use variable ND filters, the cheapest I have found with negligible colour cast are those from 7Day Shop

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Go-to-7dayshop/_i.html?_nkw=variable+nd&submit=Search&_...

Another tip is to buy the filter to fit your largest lens and use much cheaper step up rings to fit the filter to your smaller lenses.

Ricoh/Pentax have released a firmware update for the K-01 V1.4

http://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/support/digital/k-01_s.html

According to Pentax it maximises contrast with DA Limited lenses.

There are alternatives, this problem was faced by early photographers, they go over it by using a frame 'peep' site, you see them on old pictures of press photographers, something like this.

http://thumbs2.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m2nRqOQ97Z8wTeb0ztq1qdQ.jpg

Shouldn't be too hard to concoct something similar to fit into the hot shoe.

The modern equivalent is the 'red dot finder'. The project a red dot onto a semi-silvered screen, there's no magnification, but once calibrated the red dot always shows the centre of your frame superimposed on your view through the screen, they get rid of any parallax error. Note these don't send a laser beam onto your subject, just a dot onto their screen.

Two designs I've come across.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Red-Green-Electro-Dot-Sight-FIVE-Illumination-Levels-B...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Red-Green-Electro-Dot-Sight-4-Reticles-5-Illumination-...

The problem with these is they don't show the edges of the frame and getting the adapter to fit them to the hotshoe can be hard to find, and they are quite large on a Q.

They are both well made with metal castings throughout, very rugged. I prefer the second one. The first one seems to be identical to the Pentax labelled product.