Obligatory first K-1 shot...

Just a quick note to say, THE K-1 HAS LANDED! YAY!

OK, the obligatory first crappy shot of the pet, might as well get it over with:

Why does my human keep clicking that blasted thing at me and waking me up? Tamron XRDi 28-75 @50mm F5.6 ISO3200 1/30th hand held.

Some quick commentary on the K-1:

First, it is light years beyond my K-5 classic in many ways. I have never experienced autofocus on this level from a Pentax digital body to date. It is pure joy to handle and shoot with, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission. Everything else is icing on the cake. The faster CPU is a joy, the big viewfinder is awesome! I probably won't be putting back my 1.3x eyepiece, because with the diopter adjustment and FF view, I can see everything great, including the levels... and the biggie...the new autofocus is slick, even on old lenses like the SMC-F 35-105mm, or FA50 1.4. It's still a bit of a slog on the DA55-300mm if you don't prefocus before trying to shoot something tiny in the sky, but the good news is that the DA looks fine in crop mode. It actually covers a fair bit more than crop mode, so suggest shooting in FF, and manually cropping later. Both my Tamron's work very fast and precise now, and in low light too. The 70-200 might also hunt a little if you are trying to hit a tiny spec in the sky without prefocusing a little, but once it locks on, the continuous AF tracks the object really well.

OK, that said, it does not instantly make you a better photographer. And, I am just the guy to prove that rule! LOL!

If you just fire away like a tourist, not paying attention, and underexpose your image by a full stop or more, while shooting using something that should be clean like ISO 400, you can still push the shadows enough to see plenty of noise when pixel peeping, unless you de-noise it in post. I'm just saying, the camera is awesome, but not magic. (almost, heh heh, but not quite) So the basic rules still apply, try and get exposure close, so your post processing will be a breeze.

My back and neck have out-voted my head, and like the tilt monitor thing a lot. Very handy for taking low perspective hand held shots without a trip to the chiropractor.

The weight - Mmmm... I really didn't notice it, and I took it for a pretty long walk in the woods on a hot day. Maybe my excitement compensated?

Minor quibbles -

The playback button... I kept hitting Live View when I want to chimp for the first few hours... made me say some naughty words. That's ok, getting used to it (the button placement, not the cussing).

Toys - All the toys eat a fair bit of battery power, I find leaving the rear LCD off and not enabling anything extra while out in the field helps a lot. So... my User1 setting is pretty much everything unnecessary OFF, manual everything, RAW, 3 sec review for chimping is my only luxury.

The DCU that came with it was 5.5.0, and I had been using Photoshop CS6 with my K-5, I hadn't used Silky pix or DCU since my *ist Ds. I still like workflow in ACR and CS6 way better, but I installed DCU and downloaded the update to DCU 5.5.1 right away so I could play with Pixel Shift. Tried some hand held PS... I can see the potential, but I really think it's going to take a tripod to get the full potential out of it.

More later as I play and learn to get the most out of this thing.