Originally posted by clutch My problem is that I just bought a K-7 as my first DSLR about three months ago. I got into Pentax because I liked the system as a whole (primes, SR, backwards compatibility, WR, price) and was willing to live with the perceived sensor shortcomings. The K-7's been a great camera and I'm averaging 1000 shots a month with it. The K-5 looks perfect to me. It's my K-7 with the few improvements I would want added to it. It's hard to justify an upgrade now though. It will probably be a good six months to a year before I could justify selling my K-7 and buying a K-5. I'm thinking that the price of the K-5 should drop faster than the resale value of my K-7 though, so I'm probably better off waiting even if I'll lose a couple $100 on my K-7 later on.
I could definitely use 3 stops more of high ISO. I've been shooting hummingbirds a lot lately just before their migration. I've found I need 1/1600 and ISO 1600 at f/8 on my 400mm to really stop their motion and keep their wings from just disappearing. It would be nice to have an ISO 1600 with the image quality I get at ISO400 now. On the K-7 I feel like ISO1600 is a "setting of last resort", but I'm not really happy with the IQ. I haven't started shooting in RAW and doing NR in post yet, so I could probably get better results that way. It would be nice to get better IQ straight out of the camera jpg's without having to do that though.
For me, owning a K-5 will be "when" not "if".
if you could spare an additional $700 bucks and sell your K-7 slightly below what you pay for, then it doesn't sound too bad.
I was considering such a thought, but there are several factors that held me back from purchasing or pre-ordering it well ahead of schedule.
factors such as,
1.> I can buy it cheaper after a few months or from someone after a month or so. learned my lesson as I paid for an additional $800 for a new one, then later found out someone selling a used one after a few weeks (2 weeks, I guess) for less. could had saved and used that $800 for something else or purchase of a great lens like an FA31 or FA77.
2.> my priority right now is saving my money for a lens that I really need. so a camera purchase needs to take the backseat to it for now.
3.> I'm waiting for what Pentax has in-stored for next year.
don't get me wrong, the K-5 is a promising camera, but it's not on top of my priority list. if I only own the K10D, I would had considered it at the top of the list by now.
addition: A need for an FF dlsr and the announcement of the X100 are also factors that pushed the k-5 down the wanted list.