Groucho-
Go get that auto focus 50 mm for me! LOL! I'll give you $200 for it. I haven't seen it for less than $350 and I'm hesitant about picking out a used lens myself because I'm not sure what to look for in a used lens. Now you have the experience to tell if it's junk or not. I really want to stick with auto focus as I have enough to learn!
This is the older Pentax-F 50mm F1.7, not the current Pentax-FA 50mm F1.4. The latter is the one that you can still buy new and often goes for close to $350. (It was $200 back when I bought it!) The F1.7 usually goes second-hand for $200 or less; check eBay for examples. Some feel that it is even sharper than the F1.4, but I suspect it comes down to individual variances between the lenses.
I will say that autofocus is quite nice for these "fast" lenses; their depth of field gets so shallow than manually focusing can be quite a challenge sometimes.
While I will love the extra usable ISO steps, what I really need is the better low-light AF. Trying to photograph a race car at 210 MPH at a night race using AFC has been a struggle with the K10!
You'd probably see a huge difference - I never shot with a K10D but I do still have my K100D which I think was fairly similar and the K20D completely blew it out of the water... and the K-7 and K-x are quite clearly faster still. From the initial buzz, the K-5 appears to another big jump forward - with the Live View focusing jumping to the top of the heap.
Oh! And I forgot to mention - if you want a battery grip and can give up weathersealing, DealExtreme has a good-quality knock-off grip for $55 or so. I've got one and am quite happy with it - the feel is good and it has metal where it should, but the buttons are a little "floppier" and the writing is wearing off, and it's not weathersealed. Still, I'm mainly interested in the extra height and it's a perfect clone of the OEM one so the ergonomics are great. When the rain comes, I remove it and put the rubber seal back over the battery grip contacts on the camera and I'm ready to go! (I keep the seal in a thick SD card holder for safekeeping when the grip is on.)
A question for the Pentaxians.......I am getting the K-7 as soon as B&H comes back on line. I am looking at getting an external mic For the video. Don't really know how much I will use it but thought I would like to have one just in case. Does anyone out there use one? If so what do you have where did you get it and how do you like it???
That is a good question and I haven't found a good answer yet. I hear Rode mikes mentioned but those are big bucks! I bought an
Altec-Lansing ATR6250 with realistic expectations. Unfortunately, I got a very strange background sound, almost like a gurgle. I did some experiments and just stopped using it. The plot thickens in that I just took a look at videos from that time, including a test video I specifically made to isolate the sound and see if it happened more closer or farther away from the camera, and I can't hear the sound. I wonder now if maybe I was having a problem with the decoders on the PC - but that wouldn't explain why the internal mike worked fine. More research required!
What I use now is an old clip-on Sony stereo mike. It's actually almost ideal in that I can clip it right to the bottom lip of whatever lens hood I'm using (not the fisheye of course.) The Altec-Lansing was a hotshoe mount, and a bit long which meant that I could appear in the image on wide lenses when the mike was pushed forward (which was usually necessary so it didn't hit you in the face!) The downside to the Sony is that it picks up a ton of wind noise outside so I may try to fashion a rudimentary windsock. I'm not looking for anything superfancy, just for the occasional short video with stereo and no fear of picking up aperture changes or the SR mechanism.
Someone starting new might want to try both before choosing.
Feel free to ask away with any questions. There are several members who have the Kx and I'm sure they will assist you. Have fun learning!
