K10D
Just a few first impressions:
It is slightly larger than their last few offerings, I actually think this is better as it fits in my hand better. I think some of their others were too small, I had to have the grip on my *istD all the time in order for it to be comfortable to hold, with the K10D it feels much better without the grip. Make no mistake though, it is still a small camera in comparison to other camera makers offerings, and it isn't too much larger than their recent cameras.
The menus and functions are considerably different than my *istD, I haven't used the K100D or K110D, so I'm not sure if these changes took place with the introduction of the "K" series digitals, or if the K10D was the first.
Very fast start-up! I can power on and fire a shot as fast as I can move my fingers, less than 1 second, very impressive!
New TAv mode, this one is slick, you set the aperture and shutter speed and the camera selects the appropriate ISO.
Along the same lines the auto ISO feature is pretty nice as well, you can set both the lowest and highest ISO you want used and the camera will adjust the ISO in the Program, Tv, or Av mode if the exposure falls outside of the range of the current ISO setting, for example if you have the ISO at 100 and set the camera to aperture priority and it can't get a fast enough shutter speed for proper exposure at the aperture you have selected, it will bump the ISO to 200 or 400 to get the exposure right. As I said you can set the range in which you allow it to compensate, I currently have mine set to use auto ISO between 100 and 400. This can also be turned off.
Anti-shake, seems to work OK, with my 50mm I was able to get some shots at 15th/sec with no apparent camera movement.
RAW mode allows you to chose between Pentax's proprietary RAW format (PEF) or DNG, according to the literature the RAW data is the same other than the format it is presented in, so I'm not sure why the PEF option is there, I would just use DNG for obvious reasons.
Batteries, the proprietary battery is a 1620mAh, and a genuine Pentax spare will run you about $45, B&H has an after-market version made by Impact, it is a 1700mAh and runs $19, I picked up three of the 1700mAh versions, this will allow one set to be in my camera and grip, with an additional set to rotate with. Good news here is recharging time on a brand new, or completely dead battery is about 2-2 1/2 hours, the manual states 3 hours, but all 4 of mine completed the charging cycle in just over 2 hours.
Battery grip, this is slick, as well as giving you a vertical release and additional battery power it has internal storage for the wireless remote and a spare SD card.
While on the subject of SD cards I will mention that it is compliant with the new SDHC format, I picked up two 4GB SDHC cards, you will need a different card reader for the SDHC cards than for standard SD cards, a lot of the SDHC cards are being sold with a reader, so you will want to get at least one card with a reader if you don't want to hook your camera up to you computer all the time.
It has a nice in-camera RAW converter the works really nice, I will explain more in this in a future post.
Kyle