Greetings,
I recently purchased a K-5 and am VERY happy with it (upgraded from K100DS). I immediately found that the raw files worked perfectly in my installation of Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4.40. However, I read somewhere in the forum that version 5.31 did a better job of processing the raw files, so installed it also to try. For several days I exclusively used version 5.31 and it seemed to work acceptably, but seems to use more CPU resources. However, the main thing I noticed is that on high-ISO files where there is some noise reduction set in-camera, version 5.31 is not properly picking up the noise-reduction settings, and I have to tweak it to get it right. Opening the same files in version 4.40, the settings get read properly and they process nicely without any need for me to change the noise-reduction settings. Other settings from the camera seem to pick up properly in both versions.
Can anyone else confirm that this is happening with your high-ISO images from the K-5? Am I missing something somewhere? For now, I think I'll go back to PDCU 4.40 as it uses less CPU, opening faster, and the output appears as good as version 5.31 to me.
Shown below are two screen shots showing the noise-reduction settings in 4.40 as compared to 5.31, opening the same image in both instances.
Thanks.
-Joe-