Originally posted by SyncGuy Just curious why do you kinda restrict your ISO to 500?
Looking at my friend's K-30, with the K5 sensor in it can handle up to ISO 6400 comfortably, even 12800 i believe.
I know that the K-30 is good at high ISO, but it's not as though it's noise-free at high ISO. Just like any other DSLR I've owned, it's best below ISO 400. Unless I'm going for a particular mood where grain is an asset, then I like my pictures to be as clean as possible. That's one of the main reasons I bought a DSLR!
I shoot high ISO when the situation calls for it, but when I'm shooting people I try to keep the ISO as low as possible since I don't find noise particularly attractive in color pictures of people, especially in the shadowed areas of their skin. I like it when you can take a picture of somebody and see the pattern in their irises and the texture of their hair, skin, and clothing. At high ISO, you loose a lot of the super-fine detail.
Originally posted by snake I honestly believe most people don't understand that the K-5/K-30/K-01 have been made with high ISO handling in mind because they're coming off compacts and don't understand ISO and other differences between an APS camera and a small-sensored compact.
Are those comments directed at me because I was shooting at ISO 500???
I think that if you look at all those pictures, you'll see that the shutter speed was appropriate for the given situation. So why needlessly go to a higher ISO?
I'm not just coming off compacts. I left compacts years ago because of the weak performance at high ISO. I've owned an Olympus e-410, e-520,Canon t2i, Pentax K-x, and now the K-30 in addition to an Olympus E-P1. But whether you were talking about me or not, I think that buyers of Pentax DSLR's do tend to be more informed than the average buyer of a Canon or Nikon. With Pentax not really being "out there", people usually don't come across it without first doing some research.
Now on the topic of the new 30mm, it would have to be a significant improvement over the old 30mm for me to consider upgrading. It looks like it's supposed to have better edge sharpness, but that's not an issue for how I typically use my 30mm. Anytime I need absolute edge-to-edge sharpness then I probably won't be shooting anywhere near f1.4 anyway, so I can go with my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 or my Sigma 10-20mm.