K-1 in hand, briefly. First impressions.

It is a beast, but a polite beast. The relatively blocky, angular outline reminds me a lot of the Nikon Df. The K-1 is heavier of course, but the grip is very nice.

Pentax K-1 at Bic Camera this afternoon.

1. The viewfinder is really nice. The AF has proper LCD overlay display, finally, and the whole thing feels much closer to e.g. Nikon than previous iterations. Still using the green display for the shooting info, unlike the D750 etc which have the easier to read white OLED display.

2. Shutter sounds tight and precise. Very nice.

3. The crazy rear LCD mount is truly a marvel. It works very well, but I can't help feel it an over-engineered, over-sized solution to a very inconsequential problem.

4. It does not feel as dense as the K-3 and I could convince myself it wasn't all that heavy, until I picked up a D500/Df/D610. Then, yeah...

5. The button layout and ergonomics overall feels ... rushed. As far as it resembles the K-3 it's fine, but there are a number of extra buttons squeezed in close to each other on the top and back that reek of too many iterations of "hi can we add just this one more thing".

6. That top LCD is SO a downgrade from any previous Pentax flagship. And to be honest I don't really feel the extra command dial makes up for it. If you do commonly adjust many of the things on the command dial, I suppose it makes sense but you pay a heavy price in losing most of the top LCD display.

So overall its a solid effort and I think it will go down very well with the Pentax crowd. It makes a case for itself against the D750, certainly.

My biggest complaint is feature creep. Which some people are going to love but I see as negatively impacting the usefulness of the camera. Sure the LCD mount is "useful", but it adds bulk to the back of the camera and takes up rear control real estate. Same thing more-or-less with the top dial, the extra command dial, vs. the top status LCD. We started with a rear LCD menu, then Pentax added quick settings to the arrow keys, then loaded up more settings onto the arrow keys, then added a quick menu to the rear LCD, loaded more settings into that until it became unusable, so now we get a top dial with yet another subset of the same settings to get quicker access than the quick menu.

You can see where I'm going with this. Yes, it's a pet peeve of mine and I complain about it with most cameras these days, but the K-1 really needs a sandblaster taken to it. Just rip this crud out and streamline the camera design. Smaller, lighter, more elegant. Then Ricoh will have my money.