Originally posted by reh321 I believe the sensors used in Sony products have something similar built in.
No, the most recent Sensors used by Sony (and Nikon) tend to count on evolving techology, namely
- dual gain pixel amplifiers
- BSI back side illumination
which give them noise superiority natively. I believe the accelerator cheating chip was a defensive tactics by Ricoh engineers, to achive still-competitive noise figures w/o having the budget granted to purchase the current expensive state-of-art Sony sensors.
And it kind of worked out, until it was revealed by DPReview and forum members.
Sony sensors don't (need to) do such cheats, because they already have the lead via technology advances mentioned above.
Sony had another issue though, purely software: a heavy-handed removal of long exposure hot-pixels, known as star eater problem. By now they learned their lesson (albeit slowly) and the problem seems gone with their recent models.
But this shows a fundamental difference
- Sony users are demanding, and give / gave Sony a hard time with their complaints. So Sony learns about the issue (slowly) and fixes them eventually.
- Pentax users are non-demanding, hail everything and neglect any quality ussues with Pentax products. Lick everything from Pentax' boots. So Pentax never gets a chance to learn about issues or about fields requiring urgent improvements, and consequently never improves on these.
This is the true core of the problem, e.g. why Pentax is so much behind in many areas (starting with autofocus to begin with).
Related to that, It could also be, that a company just needs many professional users, and active pressure from professionals' high demands, to stay on top with their development efforts.
Pentax only has hobbyists, which are not very demanding, use their cameras more as spare time toys. If this is the only user base, then the cameras evolve to toys indeed eventually, i.e. the product development focuses on toy-ish features and gimmicks, rather than on the core competencies which professionals would demand.
I think this explains the development of Pentax for the past 10 or 20 years.
That is the problem. The problem ist not DPR. They are just the messengers. Don't shoot the messenger