Movie SR is on by default. Really. That makes me believe they never, ever, tried the camera in video mode. Not even once. It looks absolutely awful, videos automatically improve by deactivating it. Pretty much always.
When did they think that THAT is useful? No SR at all would have been a big improvement, having it activated by default... might as well activate 640x480 and some odd posterization effect by default.
It's not quite true what they say in the manual, the camera isn't able to record a 35mm frame in video mode.
I do like some of the other options, and it's good that video recording is started with the shutter button. I don't like oddly placed rec buttons...
Quote: You can reduce the possibility of
recording camera operation
sounds by connecting a
commercially available stereo
microphone to the microphone
terminal on the camera.
Now that's a joke, right? They are a) aware that camera sounds are still recorded, despite deactivating SR, and they b) suggest using a microphone to get around the limitation. D'uh. We've been saying that all along, that's why deactivating proper SR is simply not necessary. For Christ sake, make it so that SR is only working when a microphone is plugged in...!
Some more sad news... it seems like Pentax only considers the HDMI output as useful for displaying the image to a TV. If properly implemented it would be much more useful for using external recorders. But since Pentax doesn't mention that I guess it's going to be useless.
Instead they focused their efforts on implementing useless stuff like in camera editing.
The existence of a color profile called flat is promising though. Unfortunately MJPEG is only reserved for timelapses, having that during normal video recordings would have been nice.
No mentioning of whether focus peaking works while recording a video.
I'm sure the stills mode is fine though, it always has been.
I do notice one improvement it seems as to the AF point selection. There seems to be a mode where you have to push the AF point selection button before you can use the cursor buttons for AF point selection. Otherwise it seems like it will default to WB etc.? That's not ideal, I'd much rather have it the other way round (and why isn't that possible, really?!). I only want to have those buttons used for WB etc. when I push a button before that... But at least there's some consistency now, something I could probably get used to. Canon and Nikon IIRC do it better though, and so do old Pentax cameras too.
Bracketing options are still disappointing, there's no sensor shift bracketing.
Of all the things they could do to make me buy the new camera, minor firmware fixes really, they implemented one. Well, not really, but half way there. Kind of disappointing, but I expected that.