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.



1
AF Frame
11
ISO Sensitivity (underlined when sensitivity can be adjusted)
2
Spot Metering Frame
Remaining Image Storage Capacity
3
AF Point
Compensation Value when adjusting EV Compensation
4
Flash Status
Deviation from correct exposure in M or X mode when Electronic Level is enabled
5
Manual Focus
12
AE Lock
6
Shutter Speed (underlined when shutter speed can be adjusted)
13
Move AF Point
Displays NR processing countdown
14
Multiple Exposure
7
Aperture (underlined when aperture can be adjusted)
15
Metering Mode
Displays blinking "nr" during NR processing
16
Shake Reduction
8
Focus Indicator
17
Flash Exposure Compensation
9
EV Bar
18
EV Compensation
Displays camera angle when Electronic Level is enabled
Exposure Bracketing
10
ISO / ISO Auto
19
File Format

 

 

Viewfinder Test Results

Coverage
Very good accuracy from both the optical viewfinder and LCD.

70mm, Optical
70mm, LCD (Live View)

The Pentax K-5's optical viewfinder and LCD both showed just over 99 percent coverage accuracy with our Sigma 70mm f/2.8 prime lens. This is very good performance.