None of those stats sound terribly impressive, honestly. And several are more or less irrelevant for actual shooting (E.g. 23 raw buffer? That's 3 seconds of shooting straight at 8FPS, wha?? Buy a camcorder or at least switch to video mode if you want to shoot video.) And although together they add up to a slight increase added up as a whole over some other models, this all gets undone by the Achilles heel of poor autofocus that the company has suffered from generally. Tiny accumulated benefits for half a dozen things and then a major hit for one of the most important = overall pretty typical camera in its class compared to existing models. IF they have completely overhauled that this time for the better, than that will change things. If not, eh, good for people who already shoot Pentax, but not a game changer.
What IS attractive here no matter what though, is a full frame sensor coverage at $1300. I give you that. Even a bit cheaper than the 6D is a good step in the right direction for the industry.
Oh, dear Gavjenks, you show how totally unfamiliar you are with the desires of people who shoot "action" photos. Calling a 23-frame buffer "more or less irrelevant for actual shooting" shows how very out of touch you are with what "action" shooting photographers involved in sports, documentary, or wildlife/nature photography want to have. See, it goes like this: you manage to get yourself, and your equipment, into a location, and a shooting position, often at considerable financial expense, or time expense, or sweat-and-effort expense (sometimes all three!), and THEN, when some good action happens, the photographer needs a camera that is capable of shooting a good number of shots, often in rapid succession, during a BRIEF TIME FRAME.
Now, with the D7100 you mentioned, the RAW buffer in the "real world" is 6 frames...basically, one second's worth of the camera being operable. ONE SECOND, and you're done shooting? UN-acceptable. Period.
This has nothing to do with video, which I think is your way of imagining that shooting an action sequence is the equivalent of just a spray-and-pray exercise. What a deep buffer does is gives the photographer not just three seconds' worth of holding down the trigger, but it ALSO means the camera has the capability to shoot 3 to 4 frames per second, selectively, for a much,much longer time span, like say the approximate 11 seconds it might take for a college sprinter to run a 110-meter hurdles race, without the camera literally shutting down. A 23-frame RAW buffer would also allow the camera to remain "operable", as opposed to
"locked up and unable to fire" during say, a 15- to 20-second encounter with say, a red fox teaching her kitts how to hunt, or any of thousands and thousands of other "action", sports or nature sequences.
On the osprey dive sequences that coastalconn likes to shoot, YES, having three full seconds, or 23 frames' worth of shooting available, would be a BIG, as in HUGE advantage, over the pathetic 6-shot RAW buffer the Nikon D7100 offers. In case you've missed it, the Nikon action shooting community using the D300 or D300s is pretty much clinging to its older bodies because the D7100's 6-shot buffer is a HUGE drawback in the type of shooting they want to be able to do;
when the action is happening, they want to be able to shoot it--not wait while their camera is locked up, writing files to the storage card(s)...
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