TLDR; summary at end
My plan was to go from the K-5 ii to the K-1, but due to a weird
confluence of events, I ended up with both a K-3 and a K-3ii.
The K-3, K-3 II and the K-1 each have advantages.
In reasonable light, if you don't shoot with wide lenses, the image
quality differences are subtle, the vast majority of the time you won't
notice.
Autofocus seems to get a bit better with each successive generation. My
big gripe with the K-1 autofocus is that I can't focus on objects out of
the center of the frame, and I often want to frame my subject in one
corner or another, or just not leave lots of empty space above someone
when shooting a portrait.
If you shoot sports, or primarily shoot with long lenses, one of the K-3
bodies might actually work better for you. In some ways, even at APS
crop, the K-1 does better than the K-3, but it's still a slower frame
rate. When shooting action, the frame rate of the K-3 bodies is
amazing, at least by Pentax standards.
Some of the disadvantages of the smaller sensor would be mitigated by
being able to use some of the APS only lenses like the sigma 18-35 1.8.
It would be interesting to compare the K-3 with 18-35/1.8 with the K-1
and the 24-70 2.8.
There are a lot of advantages to having a pop-up flash, mostly being
able to ad a bit of fill without having to lug around a a speedlight.
The big advantage of the internal GPS, to me, is if you are using more
than one body, the internal clocks are synched to each other, which
makes it easier to put shots in chronological order.
Despite the DxO numbers, in real world the K-3 actually performs as well
in low light as the K-5, you might get more noise per pixel, but you've
got more pixels to average over.
The K-1 is noticeably bigger, has noticeably shorter battery life, takes
noticeably larger raw files, and fills the buffer way too quickly if you
are shooting action in situations where you have to take photos when
something interesting *might* happen because if you wait to see if
something interesting did happen, it already happened and you missed it.
Of course, if you don't mind photos of something interesting that just
happened rather than something interesting about to happen, or at the
instant of it happening, this is less of a problem.
In general, autofocus on the K-1 is much better, largely because with
more focus points each with a smaller area it's much less likely to
focus on the wrong thing (the microphone instead of the singer. I have
got an amazing collection of beautiful photos of microphones with
singers in the background).
Low light and high ISO performance of the K-1 is quite a bit better than
previous generations.
Live view on the K-1 is a huge step up from the K-3, especially with the
electronic shutter firmware upgrade. Combine that with the flip out
screen and it is very handy in a lot of situations.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of the K-1 is shifting the angle of view
of a lot of the glass back up by a factor of 1.5 times. My 50/1.4 was
always an awkward length on APS, but it works well on full frame, and it
is really nice to have an f/1.4 standard. Granted I could have gotten a
Sigma 35/1.4, but haven't yet. The Samyang 24/1.4 on the K-1 is awesome
for astro landscapes. The 15-30/2.8 is a beast to carry around, but it's
a great fast wide lens.
Some of the APS lenses work surprisingly well at FF. The DA 35 macro
vignettes a bit when used at "normal" distances, but not much at macro,
in any case it is easily corrected, either in lightroom or by cropping.
The DA 55/1.4 vignettes a bit, I'd go with the FA 50/1.4 unless you're
in the rain. The DA55-300 works surprisingly well at the wide and long
ends, but it does weird cropping between about 100-200mm.
There are aspects of the new UI I dislike, and others I prefer.
After releasing a body with more performance, more features and more to
learn than ever before, they cheaped out on the user manual, it is half
the size of the K-5, glosses over all of the details of the features and
would barely be sufficient as a manual on a point and shoot aimed at
someone who had never used a camera before.
In summary:
Other than potentially used prices, not a lot of advantage of the K-5
family.
If pop-up flash is critical go for the K-3.
If shutter rate, size, effective buffer size, or cost is critical, get a
used K-3 II.
In pretty much every other regard, the K-1 will significantly out
perform every other k-mount Pentax DSLR, even when shooting in crop mode.
--
Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
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