Pentax K-5 Viewfinder

Pentax K-5 Viewfinder

The Pentax K5's viewfinder is an optical, eye-level through-the-lens type, with the LCD monitor also able to display an image preview, in Live View mode.

Pentax says the K-5's optical viewfinder provides a coverage of about 100% and a magnification of approximately 0.92x (with a 50mm f/1.4 lens focused at infinity). The K-5's dioptric correction adjustment (for eyeglass wearers) has a range from -2.5 to +1.5 m^-1. The eyepoint is 21.7mm from the view window and 24.5mm from the center of the lens. The Pentax K-5's viewfinder is a pentaprism design, which is more costly but brighter than pentamirror implementations. The focusing screen is interchangeable and the Pentax K-5 ships with a Natural-Bright-Matte III screen installed.

The Pentax K-5's viewfinder readout does a very good job of communicating camera status and exposure settings, showing most of the usual info such as AF points, flash status, focus mode, shutter speed, aperture, focus confirmation, ISO sensitivity, EV compensation, anti-shake status, etc. Physically, it is almost unchanged from the K-7, with the only addition being an extra half-character at the end of the ISO sensitivity field, to handle the newly expanded range. Some fields show additional status information, however -- for example, the shutter speed and aperture fields show noise reduction processing progress when it is active. See the diagram (courtesy of Pentax) and table below for the complete list.