Live View and rear screen:
The adjustable rear screen is very handy. Live view is useful not only for being able to use the rear screen, but for various features only available in live view, such as focus peaking. The big problem with live view is the length of time it takes when you press the shutter for the camera to leave live view mode, take a photo, then return to live view mode to be ready to take another photo.

When shooting at night, the ability to zoom in in live view to manually focus on a bright light is very helpful.



astrotracer
Astrotracer seems to work fairly well, significantly better than it did on the K-5.

Astrotracer time is linear not logarithmic. With everything else exposure is adjusted logarithmically, this makes bracketing with astrotracer challenging.

Astrotracer only goes down to 10 seconds, but when I’m photographing fairly bright celestial objects I may want shorter exposure times.

Since the moon doesn’t move with the rest of the sky, it would be nice to have a “lunartracer” mode.

Focusing on infinity when using astrotracer is, as ever, a challenge. I tend to use live view and do my best with that. I expect that it would be develop a special night landscape live view auto focus method that was optimized for those conditions.



lights on the body:

The external lights are quite helpful when shooting at night, particularly the one aimed at the base of the lens. I wish that turning these lights on also turned on the light illuminating the grid on the display.
It would also be helpful if the lights did a better job of illuminating the various control dials.

viewfinder grid
I really like the new programmable viewfinder grid. I like being able to change the grid based on my needs. Having two electronic levels is very handy. The way it lights up when focus is locked is very useful in manual focus. I do a lot of shooting in very low light and it would be nice to be able to light the grid up other than by locking focus (or changing the focus point) in order to compose, or make sure the camera is level without having to go to live view.

The in viewfinder level gauges, while very handy could be a lot better. Rather than leaving them in the same physical place in the viewfinder, why not always have them at the bottom and the right, no matter what the camera’s orientation?

When the camera locks focus and the grid blinks red, the light is quite visible from the other side of the lens. This can be useful when manually focusing for a selfie, you can tell when you are in focus.

Rear screen/live view:
Ricoh implemented a very clever design for the rear screen, which seems to be quite sturdy. However, this design does give up some flexibility and doesn’t allow flipping it such that the LCD is protected.

Live view works very well for macro or landscape mode. With the electronic shutter activated, mirror lockup doesn’t seem to have any advantages in stability. I haven’t figured out how to set the five way button default in LV mode to moving the focus point.

Focus peaking in live view works well for manual focusing in low light. Unfortunately, the shutter lag in live view makes it nearly unusable for any sort of action photography. An optional EVF that fit in the hot shoe and worked without the shutter lag would be an amazing feature.

usb
Ricoh finally added the ability to tether this camera with Lightroom, but downgraded the USB from 3.0 to 2.0. I finally have a use for USB on the camera, and they slow it down to the point where it is no longer useful. WTF Ricoh? I think that this is also a casualty of the low bus speed.

wifi / tethering / open up api
In theory there are a lot of really handy things that could be done with wifi. In practice it is pretty much useless. The android software for controlling the camera is an exercise in suckage. After my initial attempts at using it, I’ve pretty much completely ignored it. One thing that could really help would be to open up the api so that third parties could develop their own uses for the wifi link.

UI in general

Most of my complaints with the camera are with the UI.

I generally want the back screen blank, but occasionally want to quickly check something on one of the other info screens. Changing the screen displayed on the back is far more awkward than it should be.

There seems to be no easy way to change between using card 1 or card 2 as the primary.

The two modes I most commonly use for reviewing my photos are using the full rear screen and showing the RGB histogram, they are pessimally located in the menu for switching between them. This is something that would be a good use of the fx button.

histogram
With the ISO invariance of the sensor, knowing the actual raw data is even more critical, but the histogram still only reflects the output of the JPEG. We really need the ability to choose between the JPEG histogram and the RAW data histogram.

jpeg centric
While it requires shooting in raw and doing careful post processing to fully exploit the amazing capabilities of the K-1, the features and UI seem optimized for those who want an expensive point and shoot. The histogram reflect the JPEG data, not raw. A tremendous amount of the UI is devoted to post processing that is better done on a desktop computer than the back of a camera. One of the buttons on the four way controller is for features that only apply to JPEGs.
I would be quite happy if they were to clean up the UI by getting rid of all but the most basic JPEG processing features.


customizable buttons
The customizable buttons, yet again, are mostly features that I have little or no use of. It is nice that one of the four way buttons (fx2) can be repurposed to controlling the flash.
There are no functions available to fx1 that I particularly have any use for. I wish that I could set it up to lighting up the viewfinder grid, or switching between two modes for reviewing images.
I never use the enable/disable button. The only place it seems to show that buttons are locked out is on the status screen, which I abhor. It would be nice if I could map a useful function on to it.

Status screen
While the status screen is occasionally useful, most of the time it is a major annoyance. What makes it worse is that there is no convenient way to easily turn it on and off, it requires multiple presses of the info button, and flipping through menus.

Extra mode dial

In general, it is really awesome.
It would be nice if when you changed it the back display showed what it was set to, the same as the regular mode dial.
It would be nice if it had the lock button, like the regular mode dial. I have noticed that after using the camera for some months, I make very little use of the extra mode dial.
After about nine months, I’ve noticed that now I rarely use the extra mode dial. I’m back to using the iso or +/- button and the thumbwheel. I rarely switch between APS and FF on the fly, and the other crop modes, such as square, don’t take up any less memory than FF.

Showing mode on the back screen:
On older cameras, changing the mode dial would cause the mode to be briefly shown on the rear screen. This was very helpful when working with the camera in the dark, especially since the mode dial is not illuminated. This extremely useful feature has gone away.

Missing info in exif data

Time of exposure is only to full second, this confuses lightroom.
Cannot tell which photos were taken in bulb, or in astrotracer.

No trailing curtain flash sync.
I would almost always use trailing curtain flash sync, but this feature has gone away.

No Dust alert

Another feature that I found extremely useful in previous cameras is dust alert, but it has been taken out of the K-1.

Buttons moved, mostly better
I like that the LV button is on the left and the review button is back where I can reach it with the right thumb. This way I can reach all of the controls I need in active shooting with just my right hand. It also gets the LV button out of the way where it isn’t always accidentally getting hit.
The switch on the top for changing between still and video works well.
For me, the mode with the five way usually in focus selection and hitting the 1 / 2 button for WB, shutter mode etc. when I need to change one of those works well.

Metering modes
Perhaps because auto exposure on my earlier Pentaxes was so bad, my normal mode of operation is to regularly chimp the histogram. Because of this, I have completely neglected learning the metering modes: center weighted, spot, etc. That button is completely wasted on me. I should probably get some coaching in how/when to use the different modes.

not able to light up guidelines in viewfinder at night
It would be trivial for the button that lights up the external lights to also light up the grid in the viewfinder. The electronic levels are nearly useless in the dark, as are pretty much any features that utilize the viewfinder grid that don’t otherwise light up.

Pixel shift:

I have not tried using pixel shift. Other people have shown it being used to good advantage on static scenes. The only post processing software that makes use of the motion correction feature seems to be silkypix. I wish they would share the code for this feature with adobe for use in lightroom.

Tethering and wi-fi

These are two functions that had me very excited when I heard about them, but very disappointed when I tried to use them.

Ricoh image sync is of dubious usefulness. First connection with my phone was fine, connecting to asus transformer was lumpy, then connecting back to phone was a problem.
Password is last four bytes of MAC address, the odds against that must be four billion to one!

I only shoot in raw, but that is way too slow to transmit over wi-fi. I want to be able to photograph in raw, and transmit preview to an external device for reviewing images on a large screen in real time.

I tried using USB tethering in lightroom, but it didn’t work at all well. This might be exacerbated by the USB 2.0/slow bus speed issue.

User Manual is lousy:

The user manual is OK for telling someone who knows nothing about photography about what to do. It rather sucks at telling someone who understands photography what the camera is actually doing in each mode.

The quality of translation in the manual is also pretty low. Ricoh is a huge company, they certainly have people working for them that are native English speakers, know about photography and could spend a couple hours copy editing the translation.

The more I’ve tried to use the manual, the less useful it has proven to be.