[philbaum]

I've had my K5 about 3 weeks now and am delighted with every day i get to use it.

One thing i noticed after using it awhile, suddenly i wasn't needing to straighten pictures anymore. This has saved me a lot of time with manual alignment. Occasionally, it'll miss straightening a picture, perhaps i've exceeded its limit, i don't know. But many times, pictures are square with the horizon, its great!!!!

Yesterday was the big test, a promotional series of 6 sets and some portraits for an upcoming play that were important to do right. After doing some initial test shots, I dialed in a -5 focus adjustment on the Tamron 28-75, which i've used for this lens before on this stage. the images sharpened nicely up. Ended up with 243 shots after throwing out a dozen or so. Shot after shot after shot were sharp.

The advice from several posts on this forum was to put in a negative 1 or 2 EV on the camera. The pictures in the lcd looked darker of course, and i was getting blinkies for the dark shadows. Due to some other advice on Pentax Forums, i had sharpness setting on my camera at ZERO to help noise removal in post processing. I was quite a bit nervous on how all this theory was going to work out. I was typically shooting using TAv at 1/160sec, F7.1, 1600 to 3200 iso. Got the pictures home and found the noise was remarkably easy to clean up with LR 3.3. Did a WB adjustment on the first of a series pictures, then did a LR Auto adjustment, then did a fast noise adjustment, some sharpness and then sync'd with 10 or 40 other pictures at a time. I don't think i ended up with any highlight clipping worth talking about - which is remarkable on a theatre stage.

A friend had his K20 in the shop, so was using my K20. The shutter noise on the K5 was easily 30% of the K20, perhaps better.

I'll put some pictures in a follow-up, but wow, what a camera. (BTW, no offense to other camera makes, but this K5 is a remarkable camera)

[Eruditass]

the horizon alignment sounds like an awesome feature. My only worry is if it gets out of line: is there a way to calibrate it?

[testdasi]

Do you do RAW or JPEG? If you want high ISO and are really that concious about making noise removal easy, why not just use RAW (in which case sharpen setting on camera is irrlevant).

[SpecialK]

the horizon alignment sounds like an awesome feature. My only worry is if it gets out of line: is there a way to calibrate it?

Pentax will have to do that for you. Too bad they don't provide user-adjustability with movable tick marks on the side of the finder....

[Quicksand]

Do you do RAW or JPEG? If you want high ISO and are really that concious about making noise removal easy, why not just use RAW (in which case sharpen setting on camera is irrlevant).

Indeed. I shoot raw, but actually have set the camera to Sharpness +2, so the on-camera preview image has some sharpening applied. I find it's easier to spot critical focus with this edge enhancement, and the raw file is unaffected by it.

[philbaum]

Do you do RAW or JPEG? If you want high ISO and are really that concious about making noise removal easy, why not just use RAW (in which case sharpen setting on camera is irrlevant).

Indeed. I shoot raw, but actually have set the camera to Sharpness +2, so the on-camera preview image has some sharpening applied. I find it's easier to spot critical focus with this edge enhancement, and the raw file is unaffected by it.

I also shoot RAW only. There was a recent thread which elicited query's as to how the OP removed noise so well. The reply was the same as i previously said. This guy claimed that sharpening associated with the original jpeg settings somehow left artifacts in the RAW file. I haven't done any kind of formal test to confirm that, but gee, it did seem easier to remove noise from the k5 files after changing the initial settings to no sharpeniing. I'll try to find the post i got the idea from.

[philbaum]

K5 with a Tamron 28-75, 1/160, f7.1, iso 4000

i gave the AF a -5 focus adjustment prior to shooting