[Culture]

I guess Tony and Chelsea have seen this thread after the DPReview debacle and decided not to mention anything about Pentax for their 2019 prediction video.

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Last edited by Culture; 01-07-2019 at 12:53 AM.

[biz-engineer]

Lol. I had to wait til a k5iis because of the anti-alias filter and now I stick with it because of the accelerator. 😁

That's a good point. No one made a sharpess test on the K1 mk II in crop mode, I'd be interested to see how K1 II crop vs K1 crop compare. I use crop mode (~15Mp) when I need more reach, and in that particular case I care about detail much more than in full frame mode.

[Class A]

I guess Tony and Chelsea have seen this thread after the DPReview debacle and decided not to mention anything about Pentax for their 2019 prediction video.

More likely that they cannot get over the fact that Ricoh does not see a point in sending them gear to review.

Alternatively, they may have no clue as to what Ricoh might be doing, in which case they should say exactly that instead of implying that there are no brands worth mentioning beyond Canikony and Fujympus.

Even though Tony gave credit to the K-1 by considering as "possibly the best landscape" camera, in his respective video he went through some ridiculous contortions to make Canon look better (as in comparing Pentax brand new prices to Canon used equipment prices, because if you are buying Pentax you are "bargain hunting"; strangely, the option to buy used Pentax gear does not seem to be available).

[Rondec]

A lot of people consider Pentax is slow and other brands are faster to develop new products. It's not quite true. Sony reuse the same bodies between models, and only slightly improved over previous models. Canon offer minor improvement on their 5D series for a long time. Nikon D800 was introduced years ago and the 810 is still for sales. Guys... will have not come down to seeing the reality as it is: a full frame system is expensive and you don't get value for the money by switching from brand to brand, pronsored pros do switch brand Canon to Nikon to Sony to Fuji, but that's because they don't pay gear.

The problem is that there really has not been a lot of improvement in sensor tech over the last five years. Yes, we now have fast read out speeds and you can shoot 20 fps with the right camera and soon be able to do 8K video with the Panasonic camera coming soon, and now you have sensors produced with thousands of PDAF points on the sensor. All great. Lets you track a black cat chasing a bat in a coal mine. But what it doesn't do is give still photographers a whole lot of improvement in actual image quality. And in certain situations, all of these PDAF points actually are significantly detrimental to the final image.

Somehow Astrophotography has turned into a holy grail in this thread and if we are honest, the K-1 is significantly better at astrophotography then nearly any of the more recent Sony or Nikon options.

If you aren't interested in video then most of these updates will just leave you feeling cold.

[biz-engineer]

The problem is that there really has not been a lot of improvement in sensor tech over the last five years.

Definitely, we haven't see meaningful increase of sensor IQ since the migration from CCD to CMOS. And lenses designed in the last 5 years are generally very good. And faster glass than f2.8 doesn't necessarily helps on FF because there are a lot of cases where full frame require to stop down the lenses. I didn't like much the DFA28-105 for some time, until I realized it is the best landscape lens out there... simply because the 105mm is great, and landscape seldom require even f5.6 even at 28mm, but lots of people fail to realize that.

Somehow Astrophotography has turned into a holy grail in this thread and if we are honest, the K-1 is significantly better at astrophotography then nearly any of the more recent Sony or Nikon options.

Astrophotography on the K1 and K1 II is awesome, it is one of the least emphasized unique advantage of Pentax. When hiking at a top of a mountain in summer time, I certainly don't want to carry an equatorial mount to track the stars, having the built in astrotracer of the K1 is definitely an advantage.

In fact, I'm concerned about the negative emphasis on things that we read online. A lot of the time, the negativity is nurtured to the point that it becomes totally disconnected from reality. I think that nurtured negativity is generally destructive for photograph itself because it generate unnecessary stress and takes people's mind away from having the pleasure concentrating on taking photographs instead of worrying about not having the best of the best camera. I believe that nurturing negativity about certain equipment , for the sole purpose of selling new equipment, is what makes some people don't enjoy photography anymore: we have recently seen those video and articles talking about photographers who quit photography.

[reh321]

My concern is “What If”? What if the new releases are less than expected? What if there is no definitive news about R&D progress and advancing the brand? What if all the speculation, hopes, and dreams come tumbling down?

Now, being a realist, I can't live my life through speculation, so the “What If's” mean just as little as the speculations of hope.

Despite this past year, when Pentax released limited FF gear and nothing APS-C {as far as I can remember}, I remain optimistic about the coming Centenary Year. I expect Pentax to again release more FF gear, but I have hopes for those of you waiting for something APS-C also.

As for me, I purchased a KP and a 55-300 PLM lens on Black Friday. I love what my 'accelerator' is delivering for me. For the first time in the Digital Age, my looking forward relates to the photos I will take with my current gear, not to the improvements that will compensate for weaknesses in my current gear. The contents of my bag are perfect for me - which is good because I also have to assume that, at my current age of 71, this may be my last major purchase.

Let's just wait and see what happens.Then we all can deal in the facts that are presented to us.

Yes!

[Class A]

As I said earlier, you can denoise a RAW containing only noise to your heart's content, and you won't lose any bit of detail - because no detail is there. You can even paint it black, or pink if that's your favorite color.
I guess what you're against of is losing noise, not detail That explains why you don't like the accelerator!

I had practically left this thread but stumbled across some measurements that help to understand that the K-1 II's "accelerator" unit is not able to magically only remove noise but leave signal (detail) intact. I thought I'd share these here, for those interested.

PDN measured the amount of artefacts in K-1 II images due to image processing (jump to "Texture loss" to see the corresponding graphs). This analysis uses the Imatest "Dead Leaves"/"Spilled Coins" charts which support the analysis of how much detail is lost in what spatial frequency band.

This confirms the analysis results by Bill Claff.

Yes, the loss of detail may be considered too small to matter.
Yes, the loss of detail may be considered a welcome trade off against lower noise.

No, it's not an imagined phenomenon.

PDN also confirms the presence of sharpening:

"The K1 Mark II sharpens images more than the K1 did, although both produce relatively little sharpening"

I was surprised to read that the K-1 already used sharpening. It would be very interesting to see the same analysis results for the K-1 and other DSLRs.

EDIT: I'm unsure whether the respective "Image Engineering" test procedures are based on RAW files or certain JPEG settings they describe. I only searched the document describing the procedures instead of reading every word. So technically, the artefacts measurements could be purely based on JPEG files. Seems unlikely but I wouldn't be able to exclude this possibility at this point.

Anyhow, let's hope Ricoh will give us the possibility of opting-out, should they choose to offer in-camera image processing again.
This would have to please everyone.

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Last edited by Class A; 01-08-2019 at 04:40 AM.

[Kunzite]

the K-1 II's "accelerator" unit is not able to magically only remove noise but leave signal (detail) intact.

For the record, I never said that it can. Especially not every type of noise.

L.E. The particular example you were quoting was about an image with no detail whatsoever, that's why it absolutely works.

[Ash]

PDN measured the amount of artefacts in K-1 II images due to image processing (jump to "Texture loss" to see the corresponding graphs). This analysis uses the Imatest "Dead Leaves"/"Spilled Coins" charts which support the analysis of how much detail is lost in what spatial frequency band.

This is one thorough and technical study of the two cameras. Although not much between them, barely even at pixel peeping ISO 100-1600 images, the quantifiable differences are there. This is definitely a geek's test! Very informative.

[biz-engineer]

the K-1 II's "accelerator" unit is not able to magically only remove noise but leave signal (detail) intact.

You don't know. For instance, sigma delta modulation (noise shaping) along with LPF can dramatically improve resolution and reduce noise simultaneously. The noise is strongly attenuated while wanted signal is little affected, gain correction will bring back the wanted signal as needed, and leave the noise behind.

[clackers]

You don't know. For instance, sigma delta modulation (noise shaping) along with LPF can dramatically improve resolution and reduce noise simultaneously. The noise is strongly attenuated while wanted signal is little affected, gain correction will bring back the wanted signal as needed, and leave the noise behind.

Isn't that an analogue technique, BE?

[Kunzite]

By the way: I'll have to take time to properly read the article, but after a quick glance I've noticed how the measured resolution was higher on the K-1 II compared to the K-1.
Could be sample/test variation. But...

[Rondec]

Let's just stipulate that there is some loss of detail along with the noise. I'm OK with that. The question is not whether that's detectable or even if you can find certain things that at one hundred percent viewing look at tiny bit fuzzier at iso 800 on a K-1 II than a K-1. It is whether this is a meaningful difference.

Each photographer will need to make his own decision there, but for me, it hasn't been a big deal -- certainly not as big a deal as it seems on this thread.

[Ash]

Anyone able to replicate or seen demonstrated the clear discolouration of shadow detail on pushed under-exposed images from the K-1 II compared with the K-1, as this guy shows?:

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

[biz-engineer]

Isn't that an analogue technique, BE?

Purely digital, it's used in every audio system, it started long ago with audio CDs. On audio CD , the sound is recorded as an oversampled stream of bits (0,1) which itself contains a quantization error (noise) of +-0.5 bit, but the large amount of bits stored on the CD allow to filter out the noise and retain a high fidelity sound signal. As I already wrote, if you take a high res. image sensor and apply some enhanced noise filtering and downsample to lower resolution, you still get an IQ superior to any native low res. sensor. You could take a 5DSr, filter it, and downsample it to 24Mp it would largely beat a Sony A7III in term of image look at high ISO, or you could filter the 5DSr frame and downsample it to 12Mp and beat the A7s at high ISO, but of course there would still be the speed disadvantage of having to acquire and process the 50Mp data for the 5DSr. Downsampling alone wouldn't improve the resulting image IQ as the amount of noise vs signal would remain the same.

The way to appreciate the difference between a K1 and K1 II is to photograph the same scene at the same high ISO setting, and then make a print from each camera and compare them side by side. The print from the K1 II will look slightly better. No one will appreciate favorably the difference between K1 and K1II by pixel peeping.