...is the size of the Operating Manuals. I'm serious! The previous flagship (K-5 II/IIS) manual weighs in at 336 pages. The K-3's is barely over 100 pages.
On the one hand, this makes the camera's operation appear to be a lot less intimidating to operate, but that appearance is deceptive because the new manual contains only a fraction of the info that was there previously. In going through the K-3 menu pages: They give you the default value (ONLY) and (most of the time) the page in the manual that contains more info on that setting. But there are a LOT of settings that don't have a page number with more info. Just a little " - ". The fonts and illustrations are also much smaller. That can't account for all of the lost pages, however. Even though I just shipped my K-5 II off to a new home, I've just printed out the manual for it so I can try to figure out what is missing. It seems to me that a more reasonable approach might be to call the smaller manual the "QuickStart Guide" and then have the full user's manual in PDF on the software CD. One example of how sparse the K-3 Manual documentation is: Storing Frequently Used Settings (Page 202-208 of the K-5 II/IIS manual).This is reduced to a page and a half (Pg 73 & 74) in the K-3 manual. This newfound brevity is also much less detailed. For example, "Slow Shutter Speed NR" is one of those menu items that now has a hyphen, rather than a page in the manual with more info. All it says in the K-3 manual is "Sets the Noise Reduction setting when shooting with a slow shutter speed". A reasonable person might ask, "What do they consider a "slow shutter speed?". The K-5 II/IIS manual has a page (87) devoted to this setting, explaining the difference between the options of "Auto, On, and Off". (There are some significant differences between Auto & On.) The K-3 manual says nothing. It is funny that this bothers me, because I'm typically a guy who doesn't read manuals. The Pentax is certainly useable without reading the manual and if you have been shooting Pentax for a while you already probably know what most of the settings do. But there are also so many options (some of which are greyed out when in certain settings) that in order to take full advantage of the camera and to set it up the way I want to work I feel like I need that information. -- Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs. ~ Alfred Stieglitz -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
