[Kerrowdown]

are apart from megapixels/ and it being full frame

Good grief... what more do you want? is that not enough.

[victormeldrew]

If the requirement (really) is to shoot portraits only for the web, never to be printed or even viewed at full size, I think both K-3 and K-1 are overkills.

[Nicolas06]

If the requirement (really) is to shoot portraits only for the web, never to be printed or even viewed at full size, I think both K-3 and K-1 are overkills.

A stupid point maybe... It really depend if you do you portraits with AF or MF. For MF, you'd want a good EVF or a split screen. Maybe the best would be A7 and old MF lenses.

But if you do it with AF, I can say from experience, that AF of a K5 as example is far from good enough for my portrait requirements. On the K3, (and I guess K3-II and K1) if I select a focus point, check it is on the eye of the subject, then the eye is in focus. Not the nose, the ear or the hair. On K5 and I think any variation of the 11 point AF (so including K5-IIs, KS2 or K70), it can go anywhere. Simply because the AF point cover a too big area.

I think this make anything bellow a K3 as innapropriate for portrait work using AF, web or not, at least in Pentax land.

[btnapa]

You got some great shots. I have plenty of static shots like yours that look good. My problems was with movement and tracking. When the B&G started to walk out, I blasted a series of shots in the hopes of getting a nice motion shot of them walking out. I got no keepers. When I did this for a living back in mid 2000, this particular shot was one of the ace images we put in the in album later on. There is so much emotion in the picture. Happy B&G and the crowds cheering in the background. This is perhaps the most telling and emotion filled images of the entire wedding. As bad as the Canon flash system was, at least their tracking was decent and I got so many unique shots of the B&G walking out.

My beloved K3 and my even more beloved FA77 failed miserably in this test. I have gone over this issue in another thread. This was a friendly wedding and I was not the paid photographer. If I did weddings for pay, the K3 and FA lenses will not be my gear to do the job. I do not have any of the new breed of DFA lenses to test with K3. Perhaps they get the job done.

I have not tried the K1 as I do not do weddings anymore. We have a few family weddings coming up this year. I will try with the K1 to see if it does any better.

[peterh337]

I had the K3 for 3 years and really liked it. 16-85 lens all the time.

Now I have the K1 with 24-70 f2.8.

Pluses:

- better high ISO (the K3 started to make noise (visible at 1:1 zoom) around iso500 whereas the K1 starts around iso2000; I used to de-noise in Lightroom above 500)
- better stabilisation (the K3 was good but the K1 is awesome - handheld 70mm shots at a slightly crazy 1/4 sec!!)
- wifi (for the occassions you need to email a DSLR pic with your phone, etc)
- GPS (for landscape photo classification, etc)
- shallower depth of field (more "artistic" but not relevant for landscape work)

Minuses:

- bigger
- much heavier, though the f2.8 lens is mostly responsible for the hefty 1.8kg (the K3 was 1.3kg)

I would have preferred a lighter lens, still 24-70 or so (or at least as wide as 24) but f4 to f5.6 would be fine. The tests of the 28-105 show it is be almost as good as the 24-70! But I did not find anything full-frame...

The K3+lens is on Ebay UK now. Sad to see it go; the extra bulk of the K1+lens will take some getting used to. I tried to go totally the other way - mirrorless and even the £2500 Sony A7, but they are horrible to use compared to a real SLR.