Originally posted by Poit I've actually been a (rather lonely) advocate of a 24MP sensor for quite some time. Are you saying above that you are in the same camp?
---------- Post added 10-12-15 at 09:29 AM ----------
Exactly, as will I. And that's what every camera manufacturer wants!
I'm curious what their solution is, though, Re sensor. I still believe, as a wedding photographer, that 24MP would be a better option (pixel size, potential frame rate, high ISO quality). As some have previously stated, the wedding photographer market is by far the largest in terms of pros....so....
I don't know that Pentax is particularly interested in the wedding market, though. I could be wrong. If they were, at least for my market here in the US, they'd be releasing insane f/1.4 lenses left and right, affordable but jaw-droppingly flawless f/1.8 lenses left and right, and a trio of 2.8 zooms for both sensor formats.
I guess they're kinda working on that last one, and their FA / DA limited primes are pretty awesome though not always super fast. But the one final key ingredient that wedding photographers demand is, wizard-like magical autofocus capabilities in low-light. Like, so dim that you can barely see through the viewfinder and hand-hold with a crazy ISO and slow-ish shutter speed, and it's still nailing focus. That's the kind of low-light AF that I've come to demand as a full-frame Nikon wedding photographer.
My interest in the Pentax FF is more for outdoor adventures and other extreme / specialty things that I think Pentax is more well-suited than any of the bigger names are. Astro-landscape photography, and any sort of extreme adventure landscape photography in general, is what I like to do in my spare time.
I may actually keep my Nikon D750 for weddings, with the 3-4 basic lenses I need to get that job done, even if I add a serious Pentax kit to my bag for my adventures.
With this in mind, my hope for the Pentax FF is that it prioritizes dynamic range and high ISO performance, and megapixels can come third on the to-do list. Having said that, since the camera will be used for landscapes, I do hope they can pull off the #1 and #2 priorities AND still hit 36-42 megapixels, actually.
36 and 42 are relatively manageable numbers when it comes to filesize, if you consider that both Nikon and Sony offer 12-bit lossy / lossless compression that gets the raw files down to about 1 MB per 1 MP. And as a wedding photographer, I find myself frequently using 1.2x and 1.5x crop mode for general candid imagery, which at 24 and 16 MP respectively, makes 36 MP a great tool for event photojournalism.
Keep in mind that I'm also a fan of the two-camera idea; I believe that eventually if Pentax is going to really do anything with this, they need to expand beyond a single flagship full-frame line and offer a high MP and low MP camera. 24 and 42 go together very nicely.