[patarok]

hm... i think Q is just on hold until the infrastructure to produce full frame cameras is up and running. The Q is huge fun. and in well lit situations a real competitor... One often hears that the Q System is really booming in Asia... So i hope at the end of 2016 or spring 2017 we will see a new Q with either WR sealings or maybe a flippy screen. Official said it is pretty sure they will soon offer EVF on Q system... maybe it will get an expansion for the hotshoe protocol. So you can mount it on the HS or it will simply be built in.
I want it soo much...
I once had a Q10 for testing (i really loved it.) and thank god, i`ll soon have a Q-S1 in my hands... This baby will do for now...

[reh321]

Sure cellphones aren't perfect, and I'am not advocating them but they offer more and more. A bit better phone would have handled the school picture just fine, at worst with an HDR mode. Hey my phone at least handle panos while I must do everything by myself on my K-mount camera!

My cellphone has HDR. HDR goes only so far in dealing with dynamic range issues (BTW - the Q-7 also has HDR, but it didn't need it in this case). I believe the real issue was that the cellphone metering was fooled by the amount of open sky and just didn't have the resources to deal with it.

I agree the Q pictures can be lot of fun but I'am sure that mounting a 300mm lens on it is really typical usage.

I never claimed that the details of what I am doing is typical What is typical is using lenses in a different way, and that can happen only with an ILC, so it cannot happen with a cellphone camera nor with a compact camera

Oh many tried there but typically a 300mm, doesn't outresolve a modern APSC sensor so a crop on an APSC body would have done as well. A cheapo used 70-300 consumer zoom is quite unexpensive and you would be really started in the field.

If you insist on the size of the body and the high price of a DSLR (well one DSLR used can be got for less than $200) then buy a used nex and mount your 300mm on it. Some can be brought used for 150$, no more than what you would pay for a Q. And really when you want to mount a 300mm anyway on it, I wouldn't say the Nex body size is the limiting factor.

Not that I want to prevent anybody from using the Q and that you can't do fun things with it, it is just that you can do many fun things with any mirorless anyway. They are not that expensive if you buy used and even the basic model new is quite affordable.

That the problem of the Q: it is a bit smaller and provide some fun but there no differentiator except the size and this come with an heavy tax on quality. Price wise one can get a nice used mirorless in m4/3 or APSC Sony E for similar price as the Q and get much more picture quality and a size that is still reasonnably small.

You just plain don't get it.

If I use a NEX or a typical APS-C DSLR, the lens is concentrating its image on perhaps 24MP spread over roughly 370 sq-mm. If I use my Q-7, the lens is concentrating its image on 12 MP spread over roughly 41 sq-mm. Because the sensor is so small, the 300mm lens on the Q-7 gives me the apparent magnification equivalent to what a 900mm lens would give me on an APS-C camera. To get the same image on the APS-C camera using the 300mm lens, I would have to crop the resulting image by a factor of 3 in each direction, which would leave me with a 2000x1333 image. From my experiences, I am quite confident that, although the lens does not resolve well enough to make best use of all the pixels on the Q-7 sensor, the Q-7 gives me more than 2000 x 1333 worth of detail.

[Heinrich Lohmann]

You are talking about completely different markets here!! The benefit of an ILC comes from its ability to change personality by changing lenses. Not everyone needs personality other than well-lighted mildly wide-angle, but an ILC is for those of us who do.

For example, my wife had a conference in Des Moines, Iowa, (about seven hours from our home) this past week. I was able to take the time off, and she took a vacation day, so we both went.

We wandered around a wildlife sanctuary on part of her day off, and I wandered farther afar when she was at her meetings.

Her hobby is bird-watching; I have never been able to assemble a passable birding system within what I'm willing to spend on that, which is one of the reasons I got the Q-7. Since I got that camera at the end of last year, I've been auditioning various adapted lenses to use for birding; in general, my experience is that newer lenses give me better CA than older ones do, but every so often I find a lens that gives me hope of getting better resolving power, which is the primary weakness of the lens I'm currently using. Frankly, at my low budget, I may just have to be satisfied with less resolution, because even that is better than anything I had before.

Anyway, on this trip I took an elderly 300mm M42 Super Takumar; turns out that CA sinks this lens regardless of how it would otherwise have resolved onto the small Q-7 sensor - but even the pictures I took with it were more useful than I could have taken with any cellphone, because back in the motel room they helped my wife sort out what she had been seeing flit about through her binoculars.

When I went off on my own, I drove past a truly desolate-looking one-room school house. My family really enjoys going up to Greenfield Village, a collection of old Americana assembled by Henry Ford; formerly, I thought it was unfortunate that Mr. Ford had moved all these buildings from where they belonged, but then I came to discover that much of American doesn't value their old stuff. This school house was one of those - it would have been good if Mr. Ford's successors had rescued this building fifty years ago. I have a Nokia cellphone that I got a couple of weeks after I got the Q-7; I originally selected it because of its camera, but I use it only when I'm planning on sending a picture to someone, because I've found that the Q-7 (which normally lives in a pouch on my belt) takes pictures which are so much better. In this case, I planned on sending the picture to my wife and our daughters, so I got out the cellphone. That was a waste of effort. The sky was covered with clouds, but it was much brighter than the school house; I suppose I could have walked much closer so that the school house was most of the picture, but I wanted the picture to show how isolated the school house truly is ... and the cellphone just couldn't handle the darkish school house against the brightish clouds. Thus, I went to the Q-7 on my belt.

These are just two examples, from the past few daze, showing the limitations of cell phone cameras. Some times they do a wonderful job, but many tasks are just plain beyond them.

Don't let the CA discourage you, it is easily fixed in ARC this took les than 2 minutes, hope that you don't mind

[reh321]

Don't let the CA discourage you, it is easily fixed in ARC this took less than 2 minutes, hope that you don't mind

Mind??

This is wonderful!!

I guess I'm going to have to become familiar with ARC!
(or at least with this application)

I have an add-on tool for gimp that is supposed to do this kind of thing, but I've never gotten it to do anything useful at all.

---------- Post added 10-26-15 at 08:35 PM ----------

Don't let the CA discourage you, it is easily fixed in ARC this took les than 2 minutes, hope that you don't mind

I just realized I read too fast and thought too slowly.

Could you give me a reference for what you are using under the name "ARC"?

[Heinrich Lohmann]

Ahh, my bad, fingers too fast. I meant of course ACR. (Adobe Camera Raw)

[reh321]

Ahh, my bad, fingers too fast. I meant of course ACR. (Adobe Camera Raw)

Are you using it as a Photoshop plugin?

[Heinrich Lohmann]

ACR is part of Photoshop (as well as Lightroom) I use Photoshop CC 2015 and do most of my processing in ACR. In the past Photoshop was way too expensive for me but now at $ 9.99 a month it has become affordable.

[barondla]

Nicholas06, you need to re-read Adam's Q test. He pitted a Nikon D800 (36mp) against the Q for super telephoto use. The Nikon struggled against the Q. How many mirrorless cameras match a FF 36mp camera?

More people use the Q for extreme tele than you think. There are a lot of birders out there. Look at how many pages there are of Q lens adapters on Amazon or Ebay. Pentax could have done a lot more to market this. They should have put the Q, a DA*300 lens, Pentax Q>PK leaf shutter adapter, and their red dot scope in a birding package. Won't happen now with Ricoh's aversion to red dot scopes. A shame. Now Olympus has one on their camera.

The advantage of the Q is a certain Swiss Army knife quality. Super compact P&S one moment, superb street camera the next, amazing aerial pole or drone camera, followed by super telephoto monster. All of this with real camera handling and controls. Even Raw shooting is supported. There is nothing else like it. It may not be your primary camera, but it should be many people's 2nd or 3rd.

Thanks
barondla

---------- Post added 10-27-2015 at 01:02 AM ----------

Excellent processing Heinrich Lohmann. Always amazed the way you make a small sensor camera look like a large one. You should do some Qutorials on this. Superb work.
thanks
barondla

[Nicolas06]

You just plain don't get it.

If I use a NEX or a typical APS-C DSLR, the lens is concentrating its image on perhaps 24MP spread over roughly 370 sq-mm. If I use my Q-7, the lens is concentrating its image on 12 MP spread over roughly 41 sq-mm. Because the sensor is so small, the 300mm lens on the Q-7 gives me the apparent magnification equivalent to what a 900mm lens would give me on an APS-C camera. To get the same image on the APS-C camera using the 300mm lens, I would have to crop the resulting image by a factor of 3 in each direction, which would leave me with a 2000x1333 image. From my experiences, I am quite confident that, although the lens does not resolve well enough to make best use of all the pixels on the Q-7 sensor, the Q-7 gives me more than 2000 x 1333 worth of detail.

Try it, 2000x1333 is 2.5MP. The Q is 12MP, that is this is a factor 4.8, or a crop factor of 2.2. I applied exactly this to your picture and put it in attachement.

The picture look reasonnably sharp, but nothing to rave about. If I apply less than the 2.2 factor to see if the Q picture maintain a good level of sharpness, say a, 1.7 crop factor, the picture look soft. And of course your orignal picture at it's original resolution is extremely soft.

We aren't at a very different level of detail here. The lens isn't good enough for that. That doesn't mean you couldn't find a lens that would do the trick, but this is not this one. I would say your best bet are with a macro lens or a Zeiss. Maybe a high end 300mm f/2.8 of even a modern 300mm f/4 with less CA would do the trick...

And soon, the new APSC camera will come with even more MP, 28, 36MP maybe, benefiting of latest BSI sensor performance... Meaning that for the trick to be worth the time you'll need even better optics.

[eyeswideshut]

Try it, 2000x1333 is 2.5MP. The Q is 12MP, that is this is a factor 4.8, or a crop factor of 2.2. I applied exactly this to your picture and put it in attachement.

The picture look reasonnably sharp, but nothing to rave about. If I apply less than the 2.2 factor to see if the Q picture maintain a good level of sharpness, say a, 1.7 crop factor, the picture look soft. And of course your orignal picture at it's original resolution is extremely soft.

We aren't at a very different level of detail here. The lens isn't good enough for that. That doesn't mean you couldn't find a lens that would do the trick, but this is not this one. I would say your best bet are with a macro lens or a Zeiss. Maybe a high end 300mm f/2.8 of even a modern 300mm f/4 with less CA would do the trick...

And soon, the new APSC camera will come with even more MP, 28, 36MP maybe, benefiting of latest BSI sensor performance... Meaning that for the trick to be worth the time you'll need even better optics.

Nicolas, why are you cropping around on the Q image? It's the APS-C output you would have to crop to get the same angle of view as the Q provides. Then you can compare.

The point you ignore though is that we we play with the Q. We have fun with that camera. We do things with it we would not do with any other camera.
Give you an example. I bought a Samyang 500mm f/8 'el cheapo' for €30 used at flea bay and stuck it on the Q for some serious and surprisingly detailed and sharp reach (ca. 2800mm FF equiv.). That is not something I would have done if I didn't have a Q. Very roughly that set up translates to 1000mm on a 36mp FF sensor. There aren't very many lenses to do that with and none I would care to buy.

So the Q is not only fun, it is enriching also.

[Nicolas06]

Nicolas, why are you cropping around on the Q image?

I know that if an APSC was used instead, there would be no more than 2.5MP or 4.8 time less pixels. But how many real MP was there in that Q image posted? Or if your prefer how capable was that 300mm to begin with? Would it provide more on Q than on APSC, because this is the claim? If I resize it by a factor of 4.8 in surface or 2.2 in height and witdth, then I have the same pixel density than the APSC camera. If the resized image look quite sharp, then maybe there more than 2.5MP worth of data, more than the 24MP APSC can record, I could try another re-sizing, a more moderate one to estimate how much I gain with the Q.

Doing that I have seen that basically for the posted picture, I see that the resized picture look reasonably sharp, not outstanding neither and lacking constrast. I know prime that do better than than on an APSC crop. For example the 50-135, the DA35 macro or the FA77. If I'am more moderate, in the cropping, it doesn't look that sharp.

The conclusion is that for the tested lens, the Q didn't provide signifcantly more detail. The lens is not sharp enough and the try to mount it on the Q, while fun doesn't provide anything more than the fun to try.

Knowing the quality of catadioptric optical design, I would not think that the 500mm you tried would fare any better so while the number your posted are impressive (2800mm equivalent), this doesn't mean you get more details. Let compute differently if you prefer. Imagine you use your APSC body with 24MP, you reframe to 2800mm equivalent FF, so 1866mm on APSC. Counting you start from 500mm, you have only 1.7MP worth of data remaining.

1.7MP is what? This is arround the resolution of a full HD picture. This is a picture full screen with potentially lot of details. Did you get something sharper than that ? Honestly?

While the Q made you try and that sure fun, the fact you didn't try with your DSLR is not your DSLR fault, it is your lack of willingness to try fun things with it, no more

Sure the Q is something small and fine and that stay a real adventage but quite many people try all sort of things with their DSLR too, they mount telescopes, they add TC, they add extension tube, they reverse their lens, they try to adapt old projector lenses... they try lenses with psychedelic bokeh, they simulate a lens baby rendering by adding some butter/oil on the front element... Evening is possible.

I will not insist more on this, my point was just that while fun the Q didn't have much in term of quality, nothing more than comparable alternatives. There only the look, the size, and the fun. That seems a lot said like this, but people will have as much fun with their Olympus Pen and still have a fantastic look something small too... And more picture quality. Some people will have similar experience with a Nex. Some will prefer an RX100, my father brought an X10 on sale for 200$ already some time ago. That still another devide that provide a bit more in term of quality. Sure you don't have ILC on this one but you get the feeling of a very good camera with fantastic controls.

I just don't see a huge market for the Q. Just my point of view.

Sorry for the incoveniance, I'll stop there.

[surfar]

A shame. Now Olympus has one on their camera(taken out of a recent post)


I own the Oly sp100 EE(eagle eye)....as well as the Q...Q10...Q7, and the Oly has taken over the Qs for my telephoto stuff.....


it DOESNT shoot raw though, very plasticky build but it arrived in excellent used condition for the cost of a RD sight...


recently shot some whales at the long digital end and its not bad, without the sight I would have only got sea


However, cargo pants and my Qs do everything else quite well...

[CWRailman]

While this thread seems to have gotten off topic, those of you interested in large lenses and cropping issues on the Q series might take a look at this site. Secrets of Digital Bird Photography
By the way, a friend of mine is heavy into birding and gets several monthly publications on the subject. He does not recall ever reading about using any of the Q series for such photography. Again an indication of an untapped market that Pentax has failed to cultivate.

[reh321]

Try it, 2000x1333 is 2.5MP. The Q is 12MP, that is this is a factor 4.8, or a crop factor of 2.2. I applied exactly this to your picture and put it in attachement.

You are using English in interesting, creative, and irrelevant ways. The crop factor of the Q-7 is 4.7 when compared to full-frame and roughly 3 when compared to APS-C. If you want to use this mysterious 2.2, then go ahead and use it for your own benefit; just don't expect me or anyone else to respond to your creativity.

The picture look reasonably sharp, but nothing to rave about. If I apply less than the 2.2 factor to see if the Q picture maintain a good level of sharpness, say a, 1.7 crop factor, the picture look soft. And of course your original picture at it's original resolution is extremely soft.

We aren't at a very different level of detail here. The lens isn't good enough for that. That doesn't mean you couldn't find a lens that would do the trick, but this is not this one. I would say your best bet are with a macro lens or a Zeiss. Maybe a high end 300mm f/2.8 of even a modern 300mm f/4 with less CA would do the trick...

And soon, the new APSC camera will come with even more MP, 28, 36MP maybe, benefiting of latest BSI sensor performance... Meaning that for the trick to be worth the time you'll need even better optics.

This is a silly conversation. My initial, central point, was that an ILC can have many different personalities depending on the needs of the user; in fact, a small investment can change its personality in mid-stream. There is no point to scaling the picture I already have; that proves absolutely nothing. I had tried many other options. The point is that this $300 camera is serving double-duty for me (the user in this case): it routinely provides better "walk-around" pictures than my 1/2.3" pocket camera and my cellphone were; it provides better pictures than I was getting using a doubler and/or cropping pictures taken with my current APS-C camera. Certainly I could get better pictures using a $$$$ lens and a $$$$ camera, but my family has better use for those funds. If you want to buy a series of fixed-lens cameras (which is where we got on this merry-go-round) to meet your evolving needs, then I'm sure that the various camera companies will be happy to take your money.

BTW: if you "read for understanding" my original post in this sub-thread, you will see that I have another lens which provides better pictures than the one you've been fussing about here; I posted that one simply because I had taken it this past week trying out the lens (and finding it to be wanting).

[monochrome]

Why are you reduced to arguing about Q?