My first impression of K-3ii

Hi all,

last two months I had a post here asking the AF speed of K-3ii. I wanted to upgrade my K10D to K-3ii but a bit concern about the AF speed of the new K-3ii, I owned K-5 but I sold it out after 1.5 years because the AF is not fast and accurate.

Yesterday, I bought the K-3ii from CR Kennedy eventually, I opened the box and I missed the compact but solid body, the handling is very great, great hand grip and you will not loss the camera out of your hand. The LCD is large as compare to K10D and K-5, also the OVF is superb, very bright and great.

I couldn't wait to plug my pentax lenses in, I have only one DA lenses which is 50-200mm, the rest are all FA lenses. Personally I love FA 35 F2, I love the colour rendering, bokeh and clarity. I put this lens to K-3ii, the first impression of the AF speed is not very fast than I expected. I tested it indoor, the light source was not very good and outside was cloudy, but AF speed is acceptable except sometimes need hunt for a short while. When I put FA31, the AF speed is on par with FA35, but for FA43, it is a bit slow, it may due to the long distant range for this gems lens. For ISO, you can use up to ISO 1,600, the image starts getting melt and loss when start at ISO 3,200 or above, of course under poor light condition. It is still okay if you do not view at 100%.

Today I took my K-3ii to take some snaps, I still put my beloved lens FA35, the weather was cloudy, partly sunny this morning. I aimed to test the AF speed and it is very surprised the AF speed is much better and faster than indoor, it does hunt sometimes but most of the time are very quick and precise in focus. Then I tried to shoot some moving object like bike or motor bike on the road, but the result was not great. I may think because i am using FA lens not DA lens. Luckily i am not the fan of shooting moving object except taking photos to my little boy. If you want to take a quick snap for the kids, you may need Nikox or Canox.

The colour rendering is very great, I miss the Pentax colour, and now this colour is back, although still missing CCD unique character but if you are Pentax fans, you do not have to tell the Pentax colour how addicted. I use the colour profile vibrant, I shoot RAW and I converted to jpeg using DCU with some minor adjustment on the contrast. In term of colour, I am very happy with it. For the ‘ details ‘ , I would prefer using LR instead, DCU manage the details like the oil painting especially when the objects are small and very far away or infinity.

If you want to produce Pentax unique colour, the only way is using DCU, my computer is i7 4790 and 16GB ram, but sadly the DCU is still running very slowly, take 2 secs to load a image sometimes it will stop by itself. I tried LR, it is very fast all along but LR cannot produce Pentax unique colour. So I need to get my patient, using DCU in order to get the Pentax colour.

Overall, I am still learning how to use this camera and optimize it. I am the fan of prime lenses. I have only one DA zoom lens which is 50-200mm. I am thinking to get a DA lenses but I dont think I need another DA prime lens. What I think is to get DA 16-85 but not sure it does help to AF speed improve or not.

Just my thoughts.

Here is some images I took this morning, they are not great.

P.S. English is not my first language, sorry for my bad grammar and English.