Originally posted by trog100 "From what I recall of the original poster's shooting needs, his main gripe was photographing indoor kids sports, hence a desire to fire away in continuous mode with a big buffer? Well, the K10D will do that, but the tradeoff will be more noise at high ISO and ISO 1600 is the limit. So if he's got $1000 burning a hole in the pockets, maybe he's better off put that money into a faster long lens now and waiting til next season, when the K10D will surely be cheaper or will have been improved with a newer model."
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chedboy makes the most valid comment.. perhaps the k100s better iso performance outweighs all the other perceived advantages the k10 has to offer.. it would to me with indoor sports shots..
in fact it does to me period.. better iso performance is numero uno..
I've just come back from a visit to my local Wolf Camera, which did in fact have a K10D on display that they were willing to let me play with for a while. Having it in my hands, testing the controls, shooting a bunch of photos, and talking to the salesman there who himself owns a K10D - all this was very helpful.
My conclusion is simple: I really wish that I had a K10D, but I think I'm persuaded (for the moment, at least) that the K10D's advantages are not so overwhelming that I can't resist them. The few disadvantages of the K10D (as I perceive them) also weigh into my feeling that I can postpone upgrading for a while.
Shooting in continuous mode on the K10D in Raw was better than on the K100D - it would shoot two images, pause, then shoot two more, then pause, etc. With the K100D, I can shoot two images (Raw), and then go to lunch. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but once the K100D's buffer gets stuffed, it doesn't seem to recover. So the K10D is BETTER, but it's hardly great. Now, shooting JPEG, the K10D can apparently keep shooting 2 fps until the card fills up. But here I'm handicapped by my desire to stick with Raw if possible. As somebody said in this thread, I think, nobody buys Pentax for burst mode. As I said, I knew that the K100D wasn't very good in this department before I bought it.
The K10D's viewfinder is nice, too - but it's not THAT much nicer than the K100D's, perhaps because I purchased the Pentax 1.2x viewfinder eyepiece upgrade? The K10D's controls do look very nicely laid out, but I think I can get the job done with the K100D, too. As I said in my original post, the other advantages of the K10D were never really decisive.
And of course I'm also influenced by the downsides of moving to the K10D: not just the cost of the camera, but the loss of the AA batteries, plus the fact that I'd have to hassle with selling my K100D, plus the possibility that the higher ISO performance of the K10D would not be as good as the K100D's, as chedoy and trog reminded me.
So, thanks to everybody for your input. I'm impressed with the K10D - but I think I can control the urge to sell my K100D and buy a K10D for a day or two more until the urge passes. This was a close call. Thanks to everybody for your informative and therapeutic help.
Will