Originally posted by klopus I note that K5 is already well more than a year old. Is there a replacement on a horizon? What to expect?
Also what are your general and honest thoughts on Pentax or even K-mount viability?
Pentax being with Ricoh will mean better stability for the brand - it won't go down easily now. But it has a lot of work to do to capture market share.
The K10D is still a competent camera. I still enjoy using it. So you don't need to hurry to replace it.
So one option is to just wait and see what else happens in Pentax land and in general in the industry.
The problem with moving to Sony A mount is that you cannot adapt any of your Pentax lenses to it. You can use M42 lenses on Sony A mount bodies, but K mount ones would either require an optical element or would lose infinity focus. So you would need to sell your K mount stuff. Or consider a NEX or some other such camera to which you can easily adapt K mount lenses.
If you can sell your stuff easily, you could move to Sony SLT. I used an A55 and an A65 a bit and I like the build and controls - particularly that of the A65. The EVF of the A65 was also very good. But I'm not sure if that is necessarily better than K mount for the reason I'll outline next.
My long term prediction/speculation is that most enthusiast users will migrate to systems like MFT, NEX, NX, XPro1, with SLTs and DSLRs being used only by pros or people that absolutely want FF sensors or DSLR designs. You will see this happening over the next years, which is why it makes sense again to wait. Right now,
MILCs are 42% of the market in Japan and they got there in just a few years. It's the writing on the wall. I don't think the K mount will survive this trend, but it will probably take another decade to die and K mount lenses will continue to be useful via adapters.