Originally posted by Dan Rentea I didn't say that. In fact, I said on a few threads that some people expect D5 or 1Dx af and performance for the price of K3, which is not possible.
I've always thought you a cool guy, Dan, an excellent photographer and very logical in a discussion. No question about any of that.
Originally posted by Dan Rentea A simple USB 3.0 and a buffer clearing (things known to be problematic with K1) are far away from D5 performance that you think I asked for.
Here's where I think you've forgotten what these mid-cycle version II things are.
The cameras aren't in continuous production. Pentax is a small company, and it just does a run, then the inventory reduces until B&H and Amazon or whatever can't source them from warehouses anymore and they're effectively a discontinued product.
A second run of the same model allows some tinkering, but that's all, because they don't want to pay for R&D again for more like four years than two.
I'm not sure people flocked to sell their K-3s and camped outside camera stores in queues to get the K3-II. It's just that you couldn't buy the old one anymore.
The silver releases have even less thinking involved.
They are possibly using this image processor at a good price because it'll be a mature product, probably the same one in the Nikon D810 -
Image Signal Processor (Milbeaut®) | Socionext Inc. Nikon calls it Expeed, Pentax calls it Prime.
Note that you can't just put USB3 into it, or up its clock speed, or change its HD video processor to 4k. These things are just not on that board.
In two years time, the image processors used by say the current top of the line Nikon lines will have come down in price, and Pentax can make an offer for them. For various reasons, I don't think the real successor to the K-1 will be as affordable, so I do think we owners are quite lucky as to how it all came together.