New Pentax K7

I've just been reading about the new Pentax K7 DSLR and interested to know if anyone has bought it yet and what they think of it?

http://www.parkcameras.com/11769/Pentax-K-7-Body.html

I'm currently using the Pentax K10 and I'm happy with the results it produces but the new K7 now has 14m pixels compared to the 10m that the K10 has. So would it be worth spending a lot of money upgrading to the K7, it costs £994 just for the body, to get potentially better images as it has 4 million more pixels than the K10. Do thoses extra pixels really make a drastic difference in quality to the image and would it be a price worth paying?

Cheers

 

I can't speak for the other features of the K7, or other improvements to image quality and whether they are worth the upgrade, but the difference between 10 and 14Mpix is unlikely to be worth upgrading for in itself. The increased Mp allows your maxmum print size to increase by about a couple of inches in either dimension.

If you're happy with the results, then stick with what you've got. I'd wait for something in the 20+ Mpix, if you currently feel limited by the maximum print size you can make.

 

Thanks for the info. I was interested to know whether an increase in mpix really made a huge amount of difference in the image quality, whether looking on-screen or printed out on 7x5 or A4 paper. I am very happy with the image quality that the K10 produces on-screen and when printed out, so I guess I'll save my money now for the time being.

Cheers

 

Yes, I don't think you'll notice any significant differences at those sizes, or on screen. The K7 is 4672 x 3104 which equates to a 13.0 x 8.6 inch print at 360ppi or a 19.5 x 12.9 inch print at 240ppi. By comparison the K10 is 3872 x 2592, or 10.8 x 7.2 at 360ppi and 16.1 x 10.8 at 240ppi. Epson recommend sending files to their printers at 360ppi for maximum quality, but it's thought to be very difficult to see the difference between a file sent at 360ppi and one sent at 240ppi, and for large prints 180ppi is thought to be plenty good enough. Most high street printers also work at around 300ppi and interpolate the original images up or down to get to this. (ppi = pixels per inch)

So, your K10D should have sufficient resolution to support your needs, and I suspect other factors such as technique and lens quality will make the differences between the cameras even smaller than the theoretical advantages.