[reh321]

monochrome Ricoh/Pentax is doing precisely what they believe they need to do but it doesn't mean it is the right thing.

I'm an end user so I do have the information to instruct Pentax to do it differently.

I'm also an end user.
If we don't agree, which end-user-hood prevails?

[Mikesul]

My goodness. What hubris.

Precisely. What any individual end user wants or even needs has very little to do with what a manufacturer needs to do to stay in business and meet its business goals. I generally stay out of these conversations where members insist that Ricoh needs to do what they want because they are, as here, just embarrassing to read. But this has gotten silly despite the efforts of the more thoughtful members to keep it sensible.

[Bromberger]

2. K-3 II successor

(...) It seems that (...) menu GUI will be completely renewed.

I think this could mean it will have a touchscreen

[Merv-O]

Precisely. What any individual end user wants or even needs has very little to do with what a manufacturer needs to do to stay in business and meet its business goals. I generally stay out of these conversations where members insist that Ricoh needs to do what they want because they are, as here, just embarrassing to read. But this has gotten silly despite the efforts of the more thoughtful members to keep it sensible.

Totally agree....but, the consumers, particularly the educated "Pentax" consumers/members of this dedicated Forum have the right to complain about RICOH's business decisions and how it may affect them. Some 'end-users' with aging APS-c bodies who choose not to move up to the K-1 series feel left behind (and truth be told-even the KP is now 2 years old).

Your'e right. RICOH owns the rights to Pentax and they can do whatever they want with it. Hell, iconic brands go belly up regularly. GM killed SAAB, Pontiac and Oldsmobile in one fell swoop and the market barely shivered, but their followers felt it. There is no harm in wanting things and discussing these 'dreams', but as you say RICOH will not be influenced by anything but their shareholders and the bottom line....

[monochrome]

Everyone is entitled to opinions and to express them in a conversation Forum. We all know I have them and I express them often (to the annoyance of many, I’m sure).

[clackers]

The market is the same for all players. If we consider smaller players, not the big CaNikons, players like Fuji or Olympus, they look like active players trying to bring something new, trying to attract new customers.

Well, I think Fuji is following Pentax, giving up on consumers and going for smaller sales volume, higher profit like the medium format series. They're kept going by Instax film. Olympus don't have that and are under tremendous financial pressure. They're releasing a m43 camera that's bigger and more expensive than the K-1, real roll of the dice stuff.

Each company must find its own way to survive, not by fitting in, but by being slightly different.

You can understand any board's reluctance to raise money from banks for its camera divisions, who might only be able to promise, 'We'll get you an eight percent ROI, but that's a long term result, maybe only after three to four years of sales, with boxes sitting in inventory in the meantime, and if the market doesn't contract."

The company's better off putting its millions into financial transactions, acquisitions or industrial/medical sides of the business.

[Class A]

The new image processing engine seems to include an 'image processing device' one should pay attention to;

Nooooooooooooooooooooo...

Some good news in your post -- and thanks heaps for sharing the information! -- but stuff like that just makes my heart sink.

Please, Ricoh, make it optional.

[Rondec]

I'm not sure why there is all this distress here. The only negative I see is the slow time table for release. The lenses themselves look great, although obviously we'll need to see what they cost at time of release. I think the DFA * primes are going to be expensive, but that's OK as long as they deliver the goods.

Certainly the hints at the "non-K3 II sequel" do suggest that the biggest thing that is slowing things down is the new image processing engine, which also could suggest some video improvements as well. It will be interesting to see if Pentax releases any other, lower end cameras this year (or in the 645 line). It is very likely they do something like that, but I guess we will see.

Anyway, the biggest message is that Pentax is sticking with the SLR market and is going to continue release new products, just in a slow-ish fashion.

[biz-engineer]

The new image processing engine seems to include an 'image processing device' one should pay attention to;

They could have RAW++ saved in the memory card. One binary file straight from the sensor for processing with Matlab (to decide manually if the pixel bit should be included or not in the image), one DNG file for normal users, and one JPEG style for the average artists. And offer an optinal Matlab installation CD instead of the usual PDCU (Silkypix) installation CD.

[NZ_Ross]

Certainly the hints at the "non-K3 II sequel" do suggest that the biggest thing that is slowing things down is the new image processing engine, which also could suggest some video improvements as well.

Video improvements would be very welcome

[Kunzite]

Nooooooooooooooooooooo...

Some good news in your post -- and thanks heaps for sharing the information! -- but stuff like that just makes my heart sink.

Please, Ricoh, make it optional.

So... it's bad before even knowing what it is?
Maybe you should switch to a brand without such processing, like Sony

[fsge]

Precisely. What any individual end user wants or even needs has very little to do with what a manufacturer needs to do to stay in business and meet its business goals. I generally stay out of these conversations where members insist that Ricoh needs to do what they want because they are, as here, just embarrassing to read. But this has gotten silly despite the efforts of the more thoughtful members to keep it sensible.

What people dont get is that Ricoh average client is japanese. Products are primarily designed by japaneses engineers for Pentax local market. We in EU or US dont necessarily have exact same needs, but have to accept it.

[Rondec]

So... it's bad before even knowing what it is?
Maybe you should switch to a brand without such processing, like Sony

I am sort of in the in between camp. I would be more in favor of Pentax having it kick in at iso 800 on APS-C and iso 1600 on full frame. I don't think it makes sense to think that it can be "turned off" easily without over complexity of firmware, but I don't know that we needed it kicking in at iso 640 on the K-1 II. I think people were pretty happy with their iso 800 images on the K-1 -- it felt more like a play to get more dynamic range on DXO Mark and Photons to Photos graphs. It did work for that purpose, but it also got them a lot of negative press too (which was unwarranted).

But I know for a fact that there's no free lunch. Any noise reduction, even PRIME, has some loss of detail. I also want clean images with minimal work. I lean more towards the second of those two things and am willing to tolerate a bit of detail loss (that I didn't know was there in the first place) in order to have clean images.

[Kunzite]

I am sort of in the in between camp. I would be more in favor of Pentax having it kick in at iso 800 on APS-C and iso 1600 on full frame. I don't think it makes sense to think that it can be "turned off" easily without over complexity of firmware, but I don't know that we needed it kicking in at iso 640 on the K-1 II. I think people were pretty happy with their iso 800 images on the K-1 -- it felt more like a play to get more dynamic range on DXO Mark and Photons to Photos graphs. It did work for that purpose, but it also got them a lot of negative press too (which was unwarranted).

But I know for a fact that there's no free lunch. Any noise reduction, even PRIME, has some loss of detail. I also want clean images with minimal work. I lean more towards the second of those two things and am willing to tolerate a bit of detail loss (that I didn't know was there in the first place) in order to have clean images.

I'm also against heavy-handed processing (fortunately, the accelerator isn't even close of doing that! No star-eater here...)

But, do we know as a fact that the new "image processing device" is about noise reduction?

The fact that we know nothing about it yet people are complaining - it seems to me, they don't actually care about the end result - the photograph. They're defending a principle. Poorly, as there's no unprocessed RAW

[MMVIII]

I am sort of in the in between camp. I would be more in favor of Pentax having it kick in at iso 800 on APS-C and iso 1600 on full frame. I don't think it makes sense to think that it can be "turned off" easily without over complexity of firmware, but I don't know that we needed it kicking in at iso 640 on the K-1 II. I think people were pretty happy with their iso 800 images on the K-1 -- it felt more like a play to get more dynamic range on DXO Mark and Photons to Photos graphs. It did work for that purpose, but it also got them a lot of negative press too (which was unwarranted).

But I know for a fact that there's no free lunch. Any noise reduction, even PRIME, has some loss of detail. I also want clean images with minimal work. I lean more towards the second of those two things and am willing to tolerate a bit of detail loss (that I didn't know was there in the first place) in order to have clean images.

Haha, this topic just keeps staying alive. Anyway, now I#m contributing by adding my 2cs....
To the switching it on or off question: we have still no real idea when it really is "active" and when idle. Tho only data we have are proxies by the deduction of the analysis of images (mainly by photonstophotos J. Claff). I am not so knowledgeable in programming SOCs but it could easily be that every image goes through this pipeline and a real time analysis decides how strong the effect will be applied. Or the EV/scene luminance is the triggering factor...

Anyhow, all the negative press came from the mathematical assesment by J. Claff and the uncertainty dpr started to spread ("Star eater on steroids...") and not primarily (!) because photographers observed the lack of detail in the images. As with the KP, noone would be able to simply "see" any destructive effect, if it would not be for a direct pixel peeping comparison with the K-1 at 200%. And as I stated before: If your well being of an image is determined by the presence/absence of the detail preserved in noise/maybe reduced as noise, something with the setup for the image went terribly wrong already at the image taking stage. If all your other parameters (lens, stability, light, distance, atmosphere...) are perfectly controlled, I could see a reason for complaints... But since the photo is a result of the sum of all parameters, this processing is certainly not the weakest link. At least in my eyes.