Originally posted by clackers I've always thought you a cool guy, Dan, an excellent photographer and very logical in a discussion. No question about any of that.
Thank you for your kind words. I know that being a little more direct make some pentaxians think that I'm attacking Pentax. I'm not. I just see things a little different than the die hard Pentaxians (luckily they are just a few) and having the posibility to shoot with a lot of cameras from different brands and also shooting often among some Pentaxians, I kind of formed an opinion about what Pentaxians want (at least the ones in my circle of friends which are not that much interested in wildlife). A lot of the ones that I often talk to don't say on forums/facebook, etc. what they think because if they say what they would like/want to see in a new camera, there must be someone who will start a debate arguing about anything.
Originally posted by clackers 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.
I know it's a small company and that Ricoh do not pump money into Pentax and Pentax is mostly self-financing, but their decissions are weird when comes to releases. The 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6 lens comes to my mind regarding weird decisions. Why not a 24-105mm istead of 28-105mm? Why not an f4 aperture instead of a variable one? And now K1 Mark II... Look at what I said yesterday regarding reviewers. Tony Northrup already created a video and all I see is "weird release", "I don't think ISO will be...", "I don't think dynamic pixel shift will be...", "Pentax is limitted in lenses", "autofocus is the same and is shocking", etc. And more will follow Tony Northrup and all these reviews (small talk to be more precise) will affect Pentax image and all the new potential clients will further think based on what they read/see on youtube is that Pentax is falling behind. That's why I see K1 Mark II as an attempt of Ricoh to bring a little more money into the company (K1 is not that much popular anymore as it was a year ago), but they forgot to take into consideration the media and the publicity around this release.
---------- Post added 02-23-18 at 10:43 AM ----------
Originally posted by reh321 I don't believe the 'accelerator' is a facelift'. We don't understand it yet - apparently KP didn't get as much exposure as it should have - but it definitely is not a facelift!
I don't believe dynamic pixel shift is a facelift. The Mark ii was out for just a few hours, and at another discussion forum an Olympus user was saying how much he hoped the next iteration of Olympus's flagship has dynamic pixel shift also.
It is not innovation either. It's an improvement on something they already had. Facelifts are about improving things and resolving problems of the prior model, at least in my opinion. Of course that photographers from other boats want some features that Pentax has. It's the same here, where people are asking either for eye af, either for focus stalking, either for tracking af, video, etc. Each system has some features known for how nice they are.
---------- Post added 02-23-18 at 10:45 AM ----------
Originally posted by robjmitchell Those dual pixels for contast af increase noise. They are bad for anyone who is not interested in video. Canon has a significant presence in the video market, so for them it brings more benefits than cost. Pentax on the other hand would loose IQ hurting the niche they specialize in.
Prior to the introduction of dual pixel af, Canon DSLRs relied on contrast-detect technology. Dual pixel af is different. Each pixel on the sensor’s surface is split into two individual photodiodes – one left and one right. Each of these can be read separately allowing faster phase-detection autofocus while simultaneously being used for image capture.