Originally posted by Rondec e. The idea of being able to disable the accelerator processor makes no sense to me since that was the main point of the upgrade and it was more expensive. If you didn't like the accelerator then you are better off just buying an original K-1.
You'd have a point if the K-1 were continued to be offered as a sister model to the K-1 II.
However, the K-1 II replaced the K-1 so the option of having untampered RAW files when shooting at ISO >= 640 is disappearing.
Even if the K-1 were still being offered, as a K-1 II owner I'd prefer if I could choose whether or not to denoise my RAW files. Maybe I want it sometimes (saving me some post-processing) and sometimes not (e.g., when stacking a lot of images to reduce noise in a superior manner).
Originally posted by Rondec This is a made up issue that shows up on graphs but not in real world situations.
There were a number of images shared on this forum or featured in the pentaxforums.com comparison which showed visible differences. For instance, dust on a PCB was clearly identifiable in the K-1 shots but became a blur in the K-1 II shots. I don't know whether respective post-processing can always get the end results arbitrarily close to each other, but I doubt it.
Originally posted by Rondec Whatever it was, the difference wasn't dramatic.
That is certainly true and arguably many prefer the smoother look over the higher residual detail in the K-1 images, so the feature definitely was counted as a "win" by many.
However, we cannot ignore the role DPReview plays on camera sales. Maybe they are not important in Japan, but they certainly are in the US and Europe. If all it takes to implement a simple switch, why not avoid handing DPReview the ammunition on a silver plate?
In Ricoh's defence given how enthusiastically DPReview responded to the KP's RAW smoothing, Ricoh would have had every right to expect DPReview to gush over noiseless post-processed images again. DPReview proved to be unpredictable in this case and to be rather malicious because even after waking up to the fact that the RAW data has been tampered with, there were no grounds to make such a meal out of it. Yet, I still think that Ricoh would have done themselves a big favour (in addition to giving their customers more freedom) by making the RAW denoising optional.