Originally posted by mom2mny I am pIanning on replacing my k-r and tamron lens. I was thinking about the KP. However, the question was asked of me if I still think Pentax and DSLR is the way to go for me because I don't have much equipment and I'll be replacing what I use the most. Honestly, I don't know what would be best for my photographic needs. I take a lot of pictures outside of flowers, landscapes and animals. I have kids in sports that I would like to be able to take quality pictures. So, I need a camera that takes quality photos of high school soccer, football and baseball. I enjoy taking pictures of mountain landscapes, birds (telephoto) and macro shots of flowers, bees, etc. I've been told that Pentax might not be the best camera for my needs. What do you think? I would like to spend around $1,000 or less.
I have two middle school aged kids who play soccer year-round. A mixture of outdoor in good lighting, outdoor with mediocre lighting at night, and indoor/futsal with mostly poor lighting.
My kit of choice for outdoor is the K-3ii and the 55-300PLM. It's fast, it's silent, and with a lot of practice and using back-button focus with center-point only I can get pretty reasonable results. Tav, where you set shutter and aperture while letting the camera pick ISO is great. Where this combination starts to show its limitations is in mediocre light. You can very quickly push ISO to 12800 or higher, especially during night games. The K-3ii is not the world's greatest camera at high ISO, although with careful post-processing and exposure you can get usable photos at 6400 or even sometimes 12800. The KP is somewhat better in this regard. The 55-300PLM's max aperture at 300mm is f/6.3.
K-3ii (and similarly the KP) does not have tracking autofocus as robust as that of many other manufacturers. You can often work around that with practice, but I'm very much looking forward to seeing the improvements in the K-3 Mark III.
To get better performance in low light you'd need a 70-200 f/2.8 to get you several stops advantage over the PLM. That's a $1700 lens. The 70-210 f/4 is also reputed to be very good, but with not as wide an aperture. That's about $1000. And, of course, you lose 100mm on the long end and 15mm on the short end.
For indoor we're kind of stuck. You need a shorter lens, preferably a zoom, with a wide aperture and fast focusing. The current 50-135 f/2.8 meets some of those requirements, but is slow to focus. I'm hopeful that they'll eventually update that with a PLM system, but if that happens it's probably year(s) in the future. The 70-200/210 options work here to some degree, but 70mm on APS-C is pretty long for indoor sports if you're near the sidelines. Perhaps the soon-to-arrive 16-50 f/2.8 PLM will be a good, fast-focusing, wider aperture option, although perhaps with less reach than you really want.
To sum up... you can get reasonable performance out of a K-3 or KP and a 55-300PLM for sports in good light. But night and indoor lighting is going to be more of a challenge. The K-3iii looks like an all around improvement for Pentax and sports, but probably at a hefty cost.