[speedoo]

Now 0 for 53. Could his review get to 0 for 100? Quite easily at the current rate IMO.

I wonder what the record is at Amazon for that?

[George Lama]

Yeah - no kidding. This guy is getting ripped on his review. Some of the comments are hilarious to say the least.

[Skymist]

Ok, I posted this comment in response to his review.

Are you SURE you have a K-5? There are some really wild statements in your review. Pentax owners see a few Canon and Nikon people getting defensive about their cameras, because of the top ratings the K-5 is earning. Let me comment specifically on your review.

"The color gradients are the same as they were with the K200D--for example, pictures of a colorful sunset will show distinct blocks of color, rather than having smooth transitions like Canons or Nikons do." If this is so, your camera is broken. Take it back. One of the prime characteristics of the K-5 is its natural, deep, low noise color gradients, especially of living things and flesh, extending well into the shadows. I commented on this in my review.

"The sharpness of the K-5 is no different than the K200D." Look at the raw comparison tests in dpreview.com. Sharpness of the K-5 is equal or better than Nikon D7000, Canon 550D, Sony A55, and any of the other cameras with the same sensor size. Study it. Again, either something is wrong with your camera, your lens, or your camera's operator. Furthermore, the K-5 detail at high ISO is less noisy than comparable cameras.

"The only improvement I've seen is when I used the Sigma or Tamron lenses!" If your K-5 gets much better with a Sigma or Tamron lens, doesn't that tell you that you have a defective Pentax lens? Pentax will be glad to repair it.

"Chromatic aberration on the K-5 is atrocious, much worse than the K200D or even the istDS." A lot of the people who are dissing your review know that chromatic aberration is a function of the lens, not the camera, so they may feel your credibility is weakened. The K-5 has no chromatic aberration problem. Again, you might have a bad lens. There is a slight tendency in one particular type of K-5 shot to develop slight purple fringing (a different effect than chromatic aberration) and in nearly every case it is easily removed in a software such as Lightroom. Just desaturate the purple a little, until it is gone. No purple fringing appears in K-5 shots unless you have pointed the camera at extreme contrast combined with extreme overexposure. Most purple fringing happens due to direct sunlight in front of the camera.

"...until the K-5 you could delete all the photos in memory by pressing the "trash" key twice. With the K-5, deleting all the photos is only possible by going through a bunch of menus. Why!?!" Use the Format command in the menu, it is very fast and easy.

"The K-5 has a separate e-dial for shutter and aperture. Again, a poor design." Nonsense - this is for pros. Ergonomically it is faster, especially in manual mode. If you're really good, you do both adjustments at once. I would not buy a single-dial camera ever again.

"yes, they have the Green Mode like on their point-and-shoots...if you completely understand what exactly this is for, or actually USE it, you're one step above me!" Every Pentax shooter knows what the Green Mode is. This comment strains believability.

"...Pentax is always a couple generations behind, technoloy-wise, than the others. When Pentax was finally making 10MP cameras, the others were making 12 & 14MP. Now that Pentax is making 16MP, the others are making 18MP and full-frames." Technology has nothing to do with megapixels. You want a $6000 Nikon D3 instead of your Pentax K-5? Yes? You know, the D3 is only 12 megapixels. Pentax K-5 has 4 more megapixels and costs $4700 less. By your logic, the K-5 is better than the D3, and you should keep your K-5 until Nikon "catches up" technology-wise.

If you really have a defective Pentax lens, and got really upset and wrote this review in anger, perhaps it makes sense. But the K-5 is a fine camera. It has set a new record for high-ISO performance for APS-C cameras. That's not something Canon did. I use the camera almost daily, and I'm extremely picky. One thing I do is astrophotography. My best Zeiss lens combined with the K-5 is a powerful combination - I've used that combo to locate faint satellites in time exposures. My measurements show an average faint star trail width of about 1.5 pixels - almost TOO sharp. Combined with an amazing resistance to noise, the camera has given my photo hobby a whole new horizon. And, by the way, I switched to Pentax K-5 from Canon. Yes, I'm an ex Canon DSLR owner. I got rid of my most recent, a Canon 550D, and associated lenses, and don't regret it a second. The K-5, while not perfect, is a big step up in quality. Keep in mind, aside from its technical specs, it is more compact than most of its competition, and it has in-camera shake reduction allowing you to use any lens Pentax has made in the past 50 years. Canon, on the other hand, turns off your shutter if you put an old lens on their recent cameras - for no reason but greed, to make you buy new lenses to go with your camera. Canon takes their camera strategy from their printer and ink strategy. If I'm going to put my money into expensive lenses, it sure won't be for a camera company who deliberately obsoletes their fine old equipment in order to boost sales.

[loveisageless]

o.k, he's now up to 62 not helpful ratings lol Just doing my part to defend Pentax's honor :-)

[loveisageless]

I once sold a Quantaray lens to an older retired gentleman who was shooting with the istD. He talked about how he was on a fixed income and couldn't afford expensive gear. He used the foam insulated lunchbox he found at a Goodwill store as his camera bag and socks to store his lenses in. He showed me some of his work and it was truly beautiful. Many of us have the good fortune to be able to afford the equipment we have, but that gentleman taught me that it is the eye behind the camera that makes the photo, not the gear. I suspect the reviewer will be trashing whatever Canon or Nikon camera he ends up with because it really isn't just about what one sees with, but rather what one "sees".

[speedoo]

Ok, I posted this comment in response to his review.

Great comment. I was hoping someone would systematically respond to his "issues" and you did it very, very well.

[pinholecam]

Someone who says he has "perfected" his technique is just nuts.
Maybe he perfected Lvl1 'noob' technique out of a scale of 10.

[steve1307]

0 for 66

and all except 1 of the comments add postively to the discussion.

[Digitalis]

sadly people like this do exist, and he will fritter away his money in search of a Flawless camera with flawless lenses - this guy would probably complain about the Leica M9 not having any autofocus, no zoom lenses, and no current lenses longer than 135mm.

The only people who find exactly what they are looking for are those who look for flaws.

[nanok]

i don't understand the point of this thread. the reviewer is either an imbecile or he's being.. ahem. paid for his services. why waste time? have you never seen people like this before? where's the surprise coming from? after 15years, and getting "really good at photography", he discovered two control wheels, and thinks it's a bad design choice. reminds me of another reviewer who said about the k10d that "the two wheels are confusing".

move along, nothing to see here.

[Rondec]

i don't understand the point of this thread. the reviewer is either an imbecile or he's being.. ahem. paid for his services. why waste time? have you never seen people like this before? where's the surprise coming from? after 15years, and getting "really good at photography", he discovered two control wheels, and thinks it's a bad design choice. reminds me of another reviewer who said about the k10d that "the two wheels are confusing".

move along, nothing to see here.

The issue to me is that it is a review on a reputable site. If a Canikon troller posted similar stuff on the forum, I would likely ignore it, but there, it can certainly skew people's ideas of what the K5 really is and where Pentax is in relation to Canon and Nikon.

Unfortunately, companies have become awfully good at seeding good reviews of their own products and poor reviews of competitors products. This is really detrimental to the review process, since someone interested in a product has to decide which of the reviews are actually honest and which ones are bogus. I have read reviews that read like a sales piece. Does anyone honestly buy a review that was written like that?

[nanok]

it is a (random) user review on a reputable site, which does not moderate reviews afaik. as you said, does anybody honestly fall for such a review? unfortunately there are people who will, and for those people the battle is lost already (so you are wasting your time). for people who fall for lame sales pitches, who will always buy the most popular brand and so on, being worried about what such reviews will lead them to believe is ridiculous, for those people who can do their homework and know what a camera is and how it works, worying is also ridiculous, because those are the people who post negative replies to such a review: no need to worry about them .

that was my point. it's just a madman screaming random words with no meaning. why stop and tell him he's wrong? it's not even true, he's not wrong, he's not making any sense, and nobody cares

[jeztastic]

Surely this guy is a troll? I mean, Bob Weiner? I mean, I do sometimes hear genuine American names that I think sound fake... But Weiner? I think we all just took his bait, his probably posting his scores on 4chan or something...

[newmikey]

I think I've got him! Flickr: Northwoods Photos' Photostream on Flickr and he ain't half as bad as I thought he'd be, actually quite a competent shooter though not competent at processing probably.

His K-5 shots show none of the "distinct blocks of color" he is complaining about nor issues with "The sharpness of the K-5".

Only thing I see is that he shoots in AdobeRGB which might impact the on-screen display in browsers or viewers that do not detect that or printing that expects sRGB. He uses Adobe CS4 which is slightly outdated and will not work with a version of Bridge that "does" the K-5's raw files so he definitely shoots JPEG only. On top of that his JPEG settings are "hard" on both contrast and sharpness at least in the few files I looked at through PhotoME.

What's this guy about? And, yes, I left another zero on Amazone review helpfullness.

[Digitalis]

If that is really him Newmikey,I have to say some of his images aren't half bad, Though many of them exhibit common compositional faults.

from what I can tell he is also using a Mac, As far as I can tell he has a sigma 10-20mm f/4.5-5.6 - FA50mm f/1.4 - a tonkina 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom - many of his images he has been using aperture values higher than f/16 - so diffraction is what is killing sharpness- and it looks like he has been using raw for some of his latest images.