Of course I've seen DxOMark on the two cameras. I find it interesting that TechRepublic used DxO's analyzer software and came up with the charts they published.
Source. Even if they made a mistake when testing, Prime M has to be an improvement over Prime II. I work in computer software design. The Prime engine is a combination of hardware and software specifically designed for one another. The thing about computer hardware is that it never goes backwards. Processors always get faster, capacity increases, price of flash memory goes down, and software design gets better.
The K-5 uses the Prime II engine to great effect, and it does great at quickly processing RAW and JPG, but one thing it isn't too great at is video. Motion JPEG is terribly inefficient for disc space and post-processing, but it's easier for the Prime II engine (because it's essentially a string of 1280x720 or 1920x1080 JPEG's) to process. Prime M (the M probably stands for motion) if nothing else, incorporates hardware h.264 encoding, which is the
de facto standard for video these days. That's a major improvement that I appreciate, and it means that some serious engineering went into the new engine.
In 2012, if I was buying a computer that I wanted to use for the next 3 years, I wouldn't go buy a computer with a Core 2 Duo when the Ivy Bridge Core i7 is available. Sometimes you need a latest-gen plastic HP Elitebook instead of a beautiful last-generation Macbook Pro.
Bottom line with all of this is - the K30 does
at least nearly as well as the K-5, and much better than the K-x, with all the features I want. Even if you go by DxO mark, the only place the K-30 scores significantly lower than the K-5 is on the landscape test, which starts to evaluate the availability of 14-bit RAW. In every other test, the K-30 scores very close to the K-5, and significantly better than the K-x.