Bingo!
Certainly in terms of theoretical bandwidth for the bus itself, but in terms of real life hard disk usage I have little doubt that it would be - perhaps significantly - faster under eSata.

Without referring to the research I did on this some time ago there is something about the old (ie non USB 3) USB standard as it applies to data transfer that just makes it unsuitable for typical backup read/write operations, where the theoretical interface bandwidth is a mere pipedream.

For example, I have an old external twin drive unit with both a USB 2 and a Firewire 400 connection gathering dust somewhere. Although the USB standard theoretically delivers nearly 2x the Firewire speed the latter is much, much quicker.

Results may vary if you are just copying the odd file but using my preferred - and free - backup software SyncToy to backup large quantities of data I find USB drives dog slow, and quite simply unacceptable.

While I’m on the subject I might as well add that I have also considered external NAS units but have rejected them because the good ones seem far too expensive relative the performance they deliver in everything apart from power consumption.

Instead I’d much rather build a PC from scratch to act as a disk server, either with a very low powered motherboard/cpu ( eg Atom based) or an entry level core2duo that could double up as a home theatre PC for the lounge; you can get some quite tasty looking cases resembling stereo components that take up to six 3.5” drives.

You can buy an eSATA laptop card for very little money, either a PCMCIA card or the new standard the name of which escapes me right now.

I am a big fan of Raid - and prefer internal - but if you are looking for an external single disk solution I would consider getting a relatively cheap SATA docker like this that connects to your laptop via a separate eSata card - depending on your system - that should cost no more than £30.

Then buy a basic hard disk such as you would fit inside a standard PC case and use this as a normal hard disk connected to your system.

Even better, if you require less space than the 1tb you mention, I would get a 2.5” laptop drive, specifically a 500Gb Seagate Momentus drive; this isn’t quite small enough to fit in your wallet, but it’s not far off and with a small case easily fits into whatever you happen to be carrying for off site storage. However, if you decide to go for this you might like to take the basic precaution of encrypting the drive with the excellent and free Truecrypt in case you forget it on the bus.

Probably not.

However, without wanting to speculate as to the reasons, there seems to be a great deal of confusion about this even at Pentax, and I hold out some hope that it may indeed be a feature in the final product.

This isn’t film; completely different rules apply.

I would have throught the base ISO of the sensor has to be somewhat higher than 100 to get the high ISO performance, and if you shoot at anything less than that the image will be sub-optimal and degraded.

As the Buddhist saying goes; “those who speak do not know”.

On the other hand at the self-service checkout those who know imperiously summon an assistant with a wave of the hand prior to the predictable problems arising, while the long-queuing technophobes look on in fear and loathing.

It’s real time Darwinism baby -- I love ‘em

Well as my upgrade requirement I was thinking 2 stops but from my personally acceptable K10 ISO 800, which lands us in the same place.

But the apparent lack of video mode autofocus is probably a dealbreaker for me.

What a shame; having evidently finally made real progress on the stills autofocus capability - as I suspected - Pentax have unfortunately been engaged in a battle otherwise long since ended.

I see it says there is contrast based auto focus in Live view with face recognition; does anybody know whether that means it will autofocus in video mode? Anyone?

Excellent Hefty. Missed that first time around -- thanks for posting!