Originally posted by jimyoung999 I'd be curious to hear about your thoughts on why you've stuck with the K-30, or is it just financial? The K-50 can be found for very little now (at least around here). I ask because I'm considering going K50-K70.
It's somewhat financial, especially for the last five years, although if my K-30 bites the dust, I'll try to replace it with a K-70 so I get a significant upgrade for the money I'm spending. I have installed K-50 firmware in my K-30, so other than the shape of the nose, there is no difference between my K-30 and a K-50.
My youngest child finished high school a year before I got my K-30, so my raison d'être for shooting sports quit performing. My wife works in a high school, and I like to experiment with my camera, so I have used it to shoot high school basketball and football, but have not put in as much practice time as I should have. Shooting high school sports is how I discovered the auto-focus limitations of the K-30/50/70. All three models use essentially the same 11 point SAFOX system instead of the 27 point system used in the K-3 and KP, but the K-70 uses a 24 MP sensor instead of the 16 MP sensor in the K-30/50, along with an accelerator chip and pixel-shift (and a flippy screen!), so for less dynamic photos, the K-70 is a much more capable camera. When I follow the play with my camera, it has a hard time keeping the focus point in focus. Take enough shots, you will get some keepers, but I'm not impressed with the percentage. A K-3III is definitely out of my price range.
Taken at 1/160 second, nobody has ever complained about the motion blur, in fact in most people's opinion it makes this image more appealing.
Taken at 1/250 and ISO 6400, with adjustments to white balance and moderate noise reduction in Topaz DeNoise. What I try to do is capture a sense of motion along with a clear portrait of one or two players. Unfortunately I can't make the shooter turn his face to me or get the defender to keep his arm down.
The next image is a result of early experimenting. I wasn't trying to get a picture of the basketball suspended in mid-air, I was trying to get a shot of the player receiving the pass and driving to the basket. Shutter timing is something that takes lots of practice. 1/160 second and ISO 6400.
If you click on these images you will be redirected to Flickr and you can zoom in to see some noise and fuzziness, but nothing compared to the original images.