Originally posted by fishy Price correction: If you check carefully you will see the lens retails at $360 rather than $450. Adorama likes to list bare products at ridiculous prices I don't know why. They do have the same lens with (useless) extras at $370. Maybe hoping that someone lazy enough will not go further and pay the inflated price? BH, Amazon both list it at $360. Still nowhere close to $190 of course!
Originally posted by fishy Then I pictured myself with a Canon 7D. And I couldn't....
Still, the one of the main reasons to buy into Pentax was their relatively low price levels and the unprecedented backward compatibility of lenses. They're no longer cheap, and good luck finding old glass....
Still, I'll be buying a K5 this year
I don't really know what people mean when they say Pentax prices are low and those same people buy newly released Pentax models. IMHO looking at the prices the picture looks different, namely Pentax releases its items at ridiculously inflated prices (introductory K-5 price being an example). At some point prices do drop of course and people like me can add Pentax items to the wish list at that point. The lowest price ever for K-5 was $750 and that is a good deal! Anything above $1200 for the K-5 is a rip-off though if you consider other brands offerings.
It is indeed nice to have compatibility with old lenses and it makes sense if you have them already (like in my case I had a few top quality M42 soviet lenses). However if you have no lenses at all, those old manual lenses aren't that cheap or easy to find.
Also if you someone who is only using the AF lenses, Pentax loses a lot to other brands due to poor availability of 3rd party lenses in Pentax mount. While Pentax own new AF lenses do not look cheap to me at all. Another issue is that due to smaller user base, there are fewer reviews on Pentax mount lenses online. Small user base brings many drawbacks and was almost a deal breaker for me. An extra $300 discount tipped my choice back towards Pentax though (and I do not regret it yet)
Canon on the other hand has a rather poor selection of bodies in the price range 1k-2k. Their lower end models with T3i are good value, their full frame is best value, however in the league of K-5 they have nothing comparable. (I have started my search for an advanced dSLR with looking at Canon offerings first).
Nikon on the other hand is looking strong in that price range with the D7000. And possibility to upgrade to full-frame (which is not important for me now, however it seemed to be important at the time I was picking my first dSLR). Basically the same thing as K-5 with very stable price of $1200, little loss of value over time, largest user base, good lenses, best flash system ... I was going for Nikon and then I got he $970 deal on Pentax (+ an extra $100 discount from Amazon).
Sorry for rant