Pentax KP Silver Body 24.32 Ultra-Compact Weatherproof DSLR with 3" LCD, (Silver)

Camera arrived today from Adorama via Amazon Prime. The camera box was damaged. No packaging material was present in the shipping container. The battery was dead so I gave it a three hour charge. The KP is solid, surprisingly hefty, and the chassis appears to be and feels well-made. The flip up flash is flimsy cheap plastic and degrades the sturdiness of an otherwise well-constructed camera. I wish Ricoh had designed the camera without flash. Dials are plastic, but feel firm enough and click with each setting. The hinged display is smallish and the resolution is nothing to write home about. The camera includes three grips which are attached by way of a hex-screw and included allen wrench. I found that the largest grip suited my hands the best. The camera is weight forward left with the 200mm f2.8 (a hefty lens). Any larger lens will require the battery grip accessory. It pairs nice and is balanced with the Pentax 55-300 HD DA WR. The camera is insanely customizable both with external buttons and dials and inner menu workings. I immediately gravitated toward the front index finger dial for adjusting shutter speed in Pentax Tav mode. Opened up I was surprised at the shutter speed. While not Nikon D500 speed, it trumps my K5 IIS. The 5-axis stabilization works and I noticed immediately better output with a 200mm, shooting some crows in flight. JPEG image output looks very good. I havent yet done any PP work from RAW. The high ISO claims are rubbish. You can shoot ISO 819200, but the images are not presentable. Maybe peak out around 6400 or 12800 with good glass. Ive been shooting with the 70mm 2.4 and missed a few shots in Auto. The Wi-Fi link through Ricohs crappy IOs App is especially finicky. I would not bother with it. This camera is a bit of an enigma to me. The size is approximate to micro-4/3 platforms, but the camera is heavy. Its a bit of a hybrid and the price point might appeal to beginners or those upgrading. The camera has some retro charm. Im keeping mine, but I am sick with G.A.S. Ill post some shots down the road.

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I bought Pentax KP and O-GPS1 as a solution for GPS tagging travel and landscape pictures. There is nothing wrong with KP as a camera - I have owned earlier Pentax models and still own both Canon (mirrorless) and Nikon (DSLR) gear and KP is certainly the best crop sensor camera I have seen. But. It did not work well with the O-GPS1 unit attached, not wanting to detect the unit if the unit was not switched on first, and even when it was, it only detected the unit 85% of the time. This all too frequent malfunction, together with a number of serious usability issues (in daylight, the "searching for GPS lock" symbol in Pentax KP display cannot be seen, and neither is the blue LED in O-GPS1 visible), make using this combo for my primary purpose very annoying. (I also wrote a separate review for O-GPS1, and will limit this review to the details more directly involved with the camera itself). I gave it a fair try, tested it during several days but could not overcome the main problem: This camera does not detect the O-GPS1 unit reliably, and this leads into power-cycling the unit over and over again, until it finally catches it. I am returning this and opting for Pentax K-1 with built in GPS. This issue was clearly a usability issue of O-GPS1, as well as an inter-operability problem between KP and O-GPS1, and I also suspect either this KP or O-GPS1 was faulty - impossible to know which one.

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