Originally posted by photoptimist just because some high-frequencies have been affected does not imply that all high-frequencies were.
Correct, but judging by the competence you display in a lot of your contributions, I'm assuming that you know full well that it isn't possible to create the perfect oracle that always correctly decides when smoothing should occur and when not.
Originally posted by photoptimist Thus, the statistical evidence does prove that the RAW is "cooked" but that does not mean it makes mush.
Correct.
There is the fact, though, that one can see the mush in some of the images.
I'd never say that all high-ISO images of the K-1 II are unusable or that they all lack detail. However, with my own eyes -- the same that I'm using to read back what I'm typing right now -- I saw the mush. I'm sorry.
Originally posted by photoptimist I'd bet that Pentax was surprised by the pushback on the K-1ii's accelerator given that they'd put the same technology in the K-70 and KP without complaint.
Yes, that's what I wrote a few posts earlier myself, adding that Ricoh may not care at all. After all, they are not too bothered with severe problems in their distributor network either. Possibly Ricoh were surprised, possibly they couldn't care less what DPReview writes. I don't know.
Originally posted by photoptimist You'd think that if the accelerator ate stars or made mush, it would have been noticed but it was not.
The KP review actually contains a passage where they wonder whether the unusual lack of noise could be down to post processing.
I'm assuming it mattered that a certain individual, who thinks less of Pentax than a dog thinks of their fleas, was not a co-author of the KP review. Incidentally, the same author responsible for the KP review also wrote the K-70 review.
Now don't you think this could be more than a coincidence?
In any event, the fact that DPReview didn't pick up the issue immediately has no bearing at all on the question whether the issue matters or not. Or are you suggesting that they are such good journalists that there is no way they could have missed an issue the first time around, meaning that when they eventually wrote about it, they were making blowing things up against their better knowledge?
I find the theory that it matters who is in the author team much more plausible.
Originally posted by microlight It seems that what Sony calls lossy raw files are effectively JPGs
That's not fair at all. Even the lossy raw files have much, much more bit depth than JPEGs do and the data they lost due to the lossy compression is indeed not that crucial. One can see artefacts in certain situations but for most images and viewing conditions the differences will be pretty inconsequential (very much like the K-1 II downsides of the processing).
Physicist falconeye actually wrote about the lossy compression back then stating, IIRC, that it was a rather clever approach and that you can recreate pretty much the same image by adding artificial noise after decompression. The reasoning is that it does not matter whether you faithfully store true noise or not store it (saving bandwidth) and then add the same kind of noise later. Again, the question is how do you avoid removing anything that isn't true noise but part of the signal and whether anyone would be able to tell if there was tampering. In both cases, lossy Sony format and K-1 II processing, there are cases where the tampering is observable but as you heard from BigMackCam the downsides of Sony's approach rarely made a difference and as you can hear from many K-1 II users, the downsides made no difference to them and they only enjoyed the positive effects.
I think the whole "accelerator" unit discussion was not completely off-topic because we are discussing future Pentax products and it could very well matter which approach Ricoh will take with future cameras but I think the debate has pretty much run its course. I don't want to repeat the same arguments over and over again and will very much try to not engage in this discussion anymore unless someone directly asks me something.