Pentax K-70 Weather-Sealed DSLR Camera with 18-135mm Lens (Black)

Initial Preview: Upgraded from a 5 year old Pentax K-5. Realized I was stepping down from flag ship series to high end enthusiast camera. But I was looking to using some new features, save money, and keep the K-5 for backup. On arrival I immediately upgraded Firmware to 1.10. At first glance the image quality seems similar to the K-5, but I havent gotten around to looking closely at images in comparison. Also I look forward to trying the new features. Likes: * Looks like it will work fine in place of my old K-5 for all my normal shooting. * The articulating back display * larger ISO range * more settings are saved in user settings (compared to k-5 which had some big limitations - such as could not be used with interval shooting) * fast charge - from depleted to mostly charged in an hour Miss: * larger battery capacity of K-5 (bought two Wasabi batteries since I have had good look with them in the past). Also ordering AC power supply for use in remote shooting * focus confirmation in viewfinder when doing manual focus Dislike: * WI-FI - when it works, its nice but limited. The remote control is very flaky. Have used the remote "Image Sync" app with both iPhone and Android tablet with similar results. It will hang at times. And sometimes after a long delay will report that it has lost communication with camera. Sometimes killing the "Image Sync" app and restarting it will start it working again. Other times need to switch the camera off and on again (not very convenient with remote shooting). It seems to work better for me if I switch off live view (save battery life) or use it for short intervals, set raw+ (instead of raw) or JPEG, and change focus to manual. At least get fewer hangs with this setup, and most of the time can recover by just killing the "Image Sync" app and restarting. Hope that this will be improved over time with updates to camera firmware or fixes to mobile app, but from past experience it may take a long time or may never happen. Also the app is limited. It only works in single shot mode and doesnt allow you to change shooting mode. Might be nice to have bracketing support, as well as video and interval shooting. Note: * Lightroom is not recognizing the PEF raw format, but after switching to DNG it works. Will update this as I get more used to the camera.

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For the price, even though this is not the newest Pentax body I am glad I chose this over the others. The grip feels more like a full size dslr than the KP and better features than all but the flagship K1. This replaces a k20 body, and is much lighter and smaller but still handles well even with large lenses. The interface is logical and easy to use without looking much when in manual. The screen articulation is perfect and feels sturdy. The live view button and video switches are easy to get to also. I have so far only done stills and have yet to use pixel shift, but I have no doubt it will be easy to get used to also. The general feel and function of dials and menus is as logical and easy to figure out as the k20 was too. I would like to see more detailed wifi settings and ability for a battery grip. Im not super impressed so far with autofocus, but not an big deal for me doing mostly still subjects. This is a very accurate camera with few faults and uses my old lens collection like a champ.

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Ive held off reviewing this camera for several months, so I would have a real feel for what I was talking about. This is a feature rich camera for its price, which is why I chose it. I shoot a lot of high school sports under the most horrible of lighting conditions, so very little of my work is done under ideal conditions and it should be noted that this will significantly influence my comments. I shoot only RAW, and cant really speak to JPEG performance. High ISO performance it pretty respectable. Not outstanding, but respectable. I get away with an awful lot of high ISO stuff that would be seriously unusable with older cameras. I mostly use spot focus for sports, but I have noticed that when using 12 or 5 point focusing the camera invariably guesses wrong on what is my intended subject. Lots of other cameras do better in this regard. I use back button focus almost exclusively and frankly the AF/AE-L button is in a very awkward location for my hand There is a nice thumb rest on the back of the camera which frequently obstructs me from reaching the AF button due to a raised ridge. Fumbling for the button has caused me to miss shots and even inadvertently hit the function wheel and accidently set the camera to 10 second timer mode. Not a good thing when you are shooting sports. The strap that ships with the camera is a non starter. Actually painful around my neck. As I tend to hang the camera around my neck during breaks, the first thing I did was buy a third party strap. Auto focus is lightning fast with Pentaxs 55 - 300 PLM lens and respectably fast with my other Pentax lenses and Sigma and Tamron lenses I own. Auto white balance is always pretty close, though I do use a grey card for most environments. The required corrections are usually pretty minor. And now for my biggest complaint. When shooting in continuous mode the file numbers are not always in the proper sequence and the capture time doesnt record fractions of a second and therefore the shots are frequently out of sequence. That is a royal pain for someone who shoots sports or anything else where sequence matters. Got to test the weather resistance of the camera shooting a football game in continuous rain a couple of days ago. No problems at all. Battery performance in inexcusably poor. Those issues aside, I get decent to really good images in horrible conditions and am pretty happy with the camera overall. The review emphasizes the negatives, because if youre looking at buying this camera those are things you need to know. Im using the camera with a variety of lenses. I have the Pentax 55-300 PLM WR, the Pentax 55-300 WR, the Pentax 50mm f/1.8, an old Pentax 35-80 that I got really cheap, A Sigma 10-20 f/3.5, a Sigma 17-50 f/2.8 and a Sigma 70-300 with macro. I also have a Tamron 70-300 with macro that is just horrible. Dont buy that.

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