[eric_h]

Very new to this camera (but not at all new to DSLRs and digital photography), so please forgive me if I'm making the newbie mistake of asking about something "everyone knows."

I've got my K-3 configured as follows: 2 128GB PNY "Elite Performance" cards installed, setup is to write to both, file format is set to record RAW+JPEG (RAW being the DNG variety), firmware version 1.11.

The cards are new and were formatted in-camera on the K-3.

I'm perplexed by the "Image Storage Capacity" value. The display is showing 1790 or so on both cards (12 photos taken have been taken.) Each RAW photo takes up 33MB and the JPEG previews average 12MB. It would seem to me that I should be seeing quite a few more available shots than this.

128GB would hold about 3900 33MB RAW DNG files. So, if I go out and take nothing but photos which cannot be compressed (resulting in 33MB JPEG previews and, likely, not possible), this should still result in about 1900+ photos. Am I dealing with some sort of special Pentax Worst-Case Math here?

More importantly, does the estimate of remaining photo space become more accurate as more photos are shot?

I've searched the site for clues but found nothing on this topic. But searching can be tricky...you sometimes need just the right words.

Thanks in advance,

- Eric

[crewl1]

Page 95 in the manual has a table that you can extrapolate from. Remaining is always estimated at worst case.

According to the table you can take 2368 RAW only (37*64GB), so that number is being reduced by the space needed for the JPG.

Make sure the cards are formatting to the full usable capacity. I saw some bad reviews on Amazon on these, hopefully you have no issues with yours. Seems folks may have received knockoffs?

[Adam]

Very new to this camera (but not at all new to DSLRs and digital photography), so please forgive me if I'm making the newbie mistake of asking about something "everyone knows."

I've got my K-3 configured as follows: 2 128GB PNY "Elite Performance" cards installed, setup is to write to both, file format is set to record RAW+JPEG (RAW being the DNG variety), firmware version 1.11.

The cards are new and were formatted in-camera on the K-3.

I'm perplexed by the "Image Storage Capacity" value. The display is showing 1790 or so on both cards (12 photos taken have been taken.) Each RAW photo takes up 33MB and the JPEG previews average 12MB. It would seem to me that I should be seeing quite a few more available shots than this.

128GB would hold about 3900 33MB RAW DNG files. So, if I go out and take nothing but photos which cannot be compressed (resulting in 33MB JPEG previews and, likely, not possible), this should still result in about 1900+ photos. Am I dealing with some sort of special Pentax Worst-Case Math here?

More importantly, does the estimate of remaining photo space become more accurate as more photos are shot?

I've searched the site for clues but found nothing on this topic. But searching can be tricky...you sometimes need just the right words.

Thanks in advance,

- Eric

Yes, the camera generally shows you a worst-case estimate. The estimate will get more accurate as you start shooting but it's still going to be an overestimate most of the time.

In practice if you figure 30Mb for each raw and 15Mb for each jpeg, you'll be looking at around 2.5k shots per card.

By the way, saving to both cards increases the write time / playback delay considerably in case you didn't know.

[calsan]

You might have the second card set as backup for the first card. This gives you half the capacity, but security in case one card fails.

If you want the full capacity of both cards, you need to set the default option. This will write to the first card until it's full, then start writing to next card.