[cali92rs]

Envelope. 5 twenties a week. Leftovers for lunch. August.

One of things i miss most about St Louis (besides the botanical garden, city museum and Forest Park) is Creve Coeur Camera.
Have you had a chance to talk to those folks about the K-1?

[monochrome]

How much weight did you loose since August?

By August. That's a technique to accumulate $2,200 within the allowed weekly spending.

One of things i miss most about St Louis (besides the botanical garden, city museum and Forest Park) is Creve Coeur Camera.
Have you had a chance to talk to those folks about the K-1?

No, I haven't been in one of their stores in a long time. It isn't clear to me from the website that CCC really supports Pentax any more (though it isn't clear they don't, either). For instance, they only have 645z and K-3ll on the website. The lens selection looks more like a few leftovers than a representative selection. There are many SMC lenses; a 12-24, DA*200, DA*55, SMC DA15, the OLD 18-55, etc. - but not a single HD lens. Plus I just got tired of the negative sales atmosphere since the new guy bought CCC.

[discharged]

By August. That's a technique to accumulate $2,200 within the allowed weekly spending.

And when the old ball and chain asks why you've lost weight ar an alarming rate at the same time as you have doubled the lunch cost all you have to say is "eating healthy is expensive"

[Nicolas06]

I know it's too easy to expect any company to do technological wonders by waving a wand and be cynical or frustrated when they don't, but I'f be interested to know what it is, in the opinion of people who understand these things (that rules me out) what it is that has held Pentax back in AF for so long (other than lack of investment, which i know is big one). I've often wondered whether it wasn't partly a price paid for backwards compatibility (I know Nikon have it to, but they might have been more fortunate for some reason in their original mount) - maybe hanging onto screw drive for too long? There is one point that I've noticed though, which is nothing to do with that, and that is that Pentax AF has always had a tendency to, if in doubt, go straight to close focus - which often results in heading off in completely the wrong direction. Even basic Canons I've played with don't do this - they are much more likely to head off in the right direction. Why should that be?

Until recently the hardware was not good enough. I mean by K5 time. The metering sensor has 77 points and the AF module was so-so. I think this was the result of not investing in it that much.

Since K3, the metering is great and AF sensor are ok. But AF-C is not an easy feature. Basically this is image analysis, the computer inside the camera trying to understand what your subject is and predict where it will be at the exact time of shooting. Image analysis is not a solved problem, it is a field or research. In fact no computer is able to analyse a picture as well as a human does and a human take too long time to perform the analysis to be usefull for AF.

There many different case to think of and the algorithms are to be trained on many different subjects. To do all this require to hire a set of competant people on a topic that almost nobody work on except a few camera makers. This kind of guys have to be paid quite well and given the time and resources to do the job.

[RobA_Oz]

… on a topic that almost nobody work on except a few camera makers. This kind of guys have to be paid quite well and given the time and resources to do the job.

I would think their major competition for employment would come from developers of autonomous drones, particularly the military variety, and other weapons guidance systems. Perhaps binding employment agreements and lucrative incomes keep them there, rather than flowing across to camera makers.

[rawr]

Perhaps binding employment agreements and lucrative incomes keep them there, rather than flowing across to camera makers.

I think much of the image analysis software smarts is available in software libraries and API's that are readily available for purchase by camera makers, or may even be open-source. Face detection in particular, but also scene analysis and possibly even predictive tracking.

But yes, good camera hardware needs good software, and the software is often the hardest to get right in complex systems.

[Simen1]

HAHA, yeah I have to reveal my secret passion in near future too... but fortunately I did some savings in case this FF Pentax baby was not a fairy tale
Hope she will understand it by any means

Remember the times she was exited after buying some fancy stuff "It only costed a couple of hundred bucks". Find out what it really costed. Tell here the camera was nothing special, just a bargain deal around the same price that she bought her stuff for.

My wife wont notice the difference from K-5 and I will keep a low profile about my excitement.

[npc]

I would think their major competition for employment would come from developers of autonomous drones, particularly the military variety, and other weapons guidance systems. Perhaps binding employment agreements and lucrative incomes keep them there, rather than flowing across to camera makers.

Don't forget self driving cars

[zosxavius]

Yeah, I think Zos Xavius is on PF at times. He's actually local to me, though we've never met. I see his stuff on FB a lot. Seems like a good guy.

I can't stand DPR. The comments sections are just toxic. I want to respond too sometimes, but I don't want to get sucked in.

Yes. I am local to you. You should send me a friend request. I have a pentaxian group on fb called pentaxians too. Feel free to join. I'm actually thinking about starting a Pittsburgh Pentax User Group. I could use a few more members....just saying!

PS Thank you for the kind words.

---------- Post added 02-15-16 at 06:16 PM ----------

I use to be there but then I found PF...

I was referring to him on the Petapixel comments.

I also see he's a Mod on the Pentaxians FB group which I havn't joined... yet.

I actually started that group.

It just seemed like something that needed done. I have bright plans for the future as long as Pentax sticks around. Feel free to join or friend me and thanks for carrying the torch.

[noelpolar]

I've gotten one step ahead of you so I have her blessing to buy it, with her mumbling $1500 down the drain...

I've said "it does not cost quite that much" each time but somehow she never gets the other part of the sentance "... It costs a lot more".

I operate on the "almost plausible" price declaration principle ........ one risks still getting in the poop when found out.... but it's survivable!

Also, my wife could help Ricoh with their focus algorithms.... she certainly has an uncanny predictive capability that she can focus at will on me! And boy, her frame rate is scary......with a really deep buffer as well.

[Nicolas06]

I think much of the image analysis software smarts is available in software libraries and API's that are readily available for purchase by camera makers, or may even be open-source. Face detection in particular, but also scene analysis and possibly even predictive tracking.

But yes, good camera hardware needs good software, and the software is often the hardest to get right in complex systems.

The software library and API may not do what you want or may not run that great on a small embedded chip. You may have to encode some routine directly in hardware to make them faster. You also need to search for them, compare them, configure them and potentially rewrite/update/modify them. You may have to combine several things together to make things work. There may be some patent hold by Nikon and Canon for the most obvious way to make this work and none of them agreeing on giving a fair price for a licence.

And the problem are not really the algorithms that are known but more all the glueing and tuning that may require lot of traning data, tuning and iterations to get right.

I honestly think that if Pentax could just buy a good AF-C tracking software for a fair price and get their problem solved, they would have done it already. After all, most of the things that Pentax put inside their camera is outsourced. The assembly and overall design is their own, but they mostly depend of what available on third party.

People think software is free because they don't pay much for it and there lot of free software out there. The truth is that common software is sold to millions of people so that you don't need to ask too much to each and can still cover the hundred millions of investment. The biggest one like Windows or Linux or firefox are the results of investment of a few hundred millions (firefox) to few billions a year (windows)...

Out of the many application that are free, many depend on the advertisement (most websites that are not themselve eCommerce), many sell your profile to ads companies and a good share of the open source libraries available are backed by big companies that are not just giving away their work and expertise. A good open source API often lack some key feature that is only available in the (quite expensive) paid version or is so complex to configure that you need a team of people working on it to get anything actually working with great results. Google before and now Yahoo pay Mozilla so they are the default search engine and they depend on good browser to be available on the web for their own survival. Eclipse, a very advanced IDE cost IBM billions, but they made it as a enabler for selling java software... Many companies contributing to the Linux kernel sell support for their own distribution...

A very small software, mostly bult on top of what already exist can easily cost a few millions for something quite basi and the price goes on exponentially as you refine it.

[falconeye]

The software library and API may not do what you want or may not run that great on a small embedded chip.

If you do a 'strings' analysis of the camera firmware (which I did for the K-5, after decrypting), you'll find the license notice for the face detection firmware used. It is from some US company, forgot which one. But visited their site, have that firmware for sale. Don't know for other parts.

But certainly, nobody is near yet what firmware could do in therory wrt cotrast detect AF.

[Nicolas06]

If you do a 'strings' analysis of the camera firmware (which I did for the K-5, after decrypting), you'll find the license notice for the face detection firmware used. It is from some US company, forgot which one. But visited their site, have that firmware for sale. Don't know for other parts.

But certainly, nobody is near yet what firmware could do in therory wrt cotrast detect AF.

And you conclusion ? Ricoh could put 3 lines of code to have everything glued and working perfectly but didn't do ? or maybe this doesn't entirely solve their problem? As I said there a world between a wonderfull software that claim do to this or that and having an efficient AF-C. People care of the actual result.

[biz-engineer]

The good thing about paper theory is that it's low risk. The downside of it is that it does not pay much.

[Matthew Saville]

1.) I'll definitely be testing the K-1 in as terrible light as I can possibly find, at weddings, with both the new 24-70 2.8 and hopefully as many classic Limited primes as I can get my hands on, certainly the 31 1.8 and 77 1.8.

Because for me, shooting with a lightweight kit using tiny yet powerful primes is the name of the game with 12-14 hour work days.


2.) The multi-point groupings are becoming very common in Canon and Nikon these days, with the D5 and D500 proving that no, you can never have "too many" AF points.

What I suspect will be the future of both on-sensor hybrid AF, and off-sensor PDAF, will be clusters of smaller AF points, maybe a 2x2 grid, or a 3x3 grid, such as Nikon and Canon are currently implementing in their 51 / 61 point AF systems, and now in Nikon's new 153 AF point module.

Honestly, half the time I really only "need" 9-12 AF points to be actually selectable. Beyond that, moving the focus point around the viewfinder more precisely becomes more of a chore than a tool. However, using multi-point clusters, and point-skipping options, could be a huge thing for the future.