[krgroothuis]

Don t know if this link was already posted: Pentax reveals more details of new flagship camera – breakfastographer

[Class A]

Funny thing is, before having a model with the identical sensor to pixel peep (sometimes at 200%) the image quality in the APS-C KP, especially the high ISO, got only praise...

It got praised by DPReview, i.e., from the guys whose evaluation of cameras includes the JPEG "quality" (quality = "what plays to their preferences") at the camera's default settings.

Note, however that even DPReview wrote

"we suspect there's some 'baking' done to the Raw files. There are clear signs of noise reduction upon further analysis of the Raw (the green channel shows blotches of no detail where other cameras do not). And this comes at a cost - sometimes decreased detail, and odd cross-hatch patterning throughout the image" (emphasis is mine)

I don't know whether they wrote that in their original review -- i.e., without having any camera with a similar sensor to compare to and/or the hindsight about the K-1 II RAW file cooking -- or added it after their K-1 II investigation gave them an explanation for the unlikely results.

If the KP was praised by its users, that's fine. I don't think anyone arguing against a mandatory activation of the "accelerator unit" minds that some users like the results of the image-processing. The point is not that the RAW baking is evil and must always be avoided, the point is that it is detrimental to some applications.

From what I saw, most of the complaints were from credential-less "experts".

It does not matter whether a fact is discovered by someone with credentials or not.
One can measure the details smoothing of the K-1 II with methods that are accepted by image processing experts. Once can also see the loss of detail with one's own eyes.

It's anyone's judgment whether they think there is no loss of detail, or that there is one but it's worth having as a very small byproduct of the otherwise welcome noise reduction, or that they'd rather get the data without "accelerator unit" involvement.

I had a good hard look at files from the K1 and the K1II and thought that the files with the accelerator unit looked better.

That's great. I think everyone is happy for you.

No need to suggest, though, that others, who don't take the same view, are "credential-less 'experts'".

[beholder3]

the point of MSRP vs street price of equipment released years ago is a perfectly valid point if the older item is better than the new one. Why would I pay, today, 2000+ for a D780 when it's a meager improvement over the D750 that goes for half the price?

You have already given one example how it is normal business practice to completely ignore street pricing.
Look at the crippled down Nikon Z5 which also costs quite a bit more than a bit higher level Z6 with street pricing.

I am not even mentioning what happened with lenses. Nifty-fifties with slow 1,8 apertures were in the 100-150 EUR range brandnew (and 70-90 used) and spec sheet wise there was no improvement, just some cosmetic changes for pixelpeepers. Sony new version 760 EUR, Nikon new version 540 EUR. That multiple hundred percent price hikes.


That is simply the way manufacturers' pricing works. Otherwise average price levels would go down every year, while in fact they have risen substantially.

You can fingerpoint at the oracle for underperformance if the K-new appears at substantially less than $1,500 / 1.699 EUR.

[normhead]

It goes into the market against what the competitor's have on the shelves that day, at that price.

But if you wait year or two....

There are many ways a K-P is already better than a D750. Those things are a given.

The K-new is for people who want the best possible camera with the best Pentax technology, not the best Nikn camera with the best Nikon technology, because almost all of us decided consciously or unconsciously that the best Nikon technology (or Canon or Sony) isn't what we want.

Does the
Take the D750 just as an example....
No IBIS.
No pixel shift,
No astrotracer.
No accelerator chip

It doesn't matter how much it costs, for some things it's not as good as a Pentax. Which is better is certainly open to debate. For some the Pentax attributes are worth paying for, the Nikon positive attributes, in comparison to the Pentax, aren't.
Comparing a d750 to a D780 , two cameras within the same design parameters is disengenius when discussing one brand compared to another with totally different design parameters. That's not at all relevant..

[Class A]

I really don't mind if people love the "accelerator unit" and may use it myself for some applications.

My point is that while it is great that it appears to be financially viable for Pentax to continue to produce cameras for a somewhat small customer base, it really wouldn't hurt if Pentax attracted some new customers as well.

If only one customer is lost because DPReview make a fuzz about "RAW baking" again -- whether they make a mountain out of a mole hill or not -- that's one customer too many.

Pentax's philosophy seems to be very compatible with the notion of purity. For that reason alone, they should allow the "accelerator unit" to be turned off. The biggest reason, though, is that they shouldn't unnecessarily lose customers, for whatever the reason is.

[Danas_Anis]

They claim it is the most advanced APS-C camera on the market.. I wonder what the AF points are and what improvements were made to focus tracking.
Very exciting!

The most advanced APS-C camera on the market? Then they should surpass the likes of Samsung NX1 and Fuji XT4, which I doubt they will do due to some simple ignorance of some aspects, that redefined what an average camera is today.

Regardless, the design of this new Pentax camera is lovely. Looks serious. Wish they designed bodies for Sony. Pentax really knows how to design ergonomic cameras.

[ThorSanchez]

If only one customer is lost because DPReview make a fuzz about "RAW baking" again -- whether they make a mountain out of a mole hill or not -- that's one customer too many.

Not if they gained three from the allure of better high ISO performance.

[Kenn100D]

I believe Shake Reduction can be mappable and any other buttons in the K-NEW. Maybe this will have AF VIdeo. I remember QS-! has AF Video Recording. But still , I'm leaning more om the still photography improvements. Let's wait and see. BTW might be named K-2 (sit's between K-1 and K-3II)

[normhead]

If only one customer is lost because DPReview make a fuzz about "RAW baking" again -- whether they make a mountain out of a mole hill or not -- that's one customer too many.

The K-P surprised Pentax, it sold to a lot of customers for whom it was their first Pentax. It didn't sell to K-3 and K-3ii shooters. SO I'd reject that argument. If they lose a few because of the accelerator chip, they gained a lot more because people liked it and the results it produces.

Every change produces some winners and some losers. They can' keep them all. The cameras using the accelerator chip have for the most part advanced the brand. And honestly, the testing I've seen is nonsense done by people who are loud , obnoxious, and clearly don't know what they don't know. Personally, I'll trade images making full use of the sensors resolution, which happens at most 5 times year, for ease in processing and better high ISO performance any day and most would. A few really picky people who get focussed on minutiae care. The examples in Imaging Resources clearly show more useful images at higher ISO over all. A few folks picking out areas of one photograph and using it to extrapolate over the whole image is silly. Some dude declaring his test to be reproducible, when no one else has reproduced it is also nonsense. (It's considered reproduceable when someone one else reproduces it, you can't declare your own work reproduceable without that happening.) Given the level of ignorance around this topic, the misinterpretation of data, the values ( I want the camera to take over every step of my post processing if possible, and I can see no situation where the noise removed by the accelerator chip isn't a plus.) I've been avoiding this issue. No one is going to change anyone's mind. But as long as people keep flogging it like its a dead horse, I guess we'll have to continue to point out, some of us see those who'd like to turn off the accelerator as out of touch with reality.

Imaging Resources comparisons are clear. The accelerator chip adds a stop of noise reduction.
No credible evidence has ever been presented that over all, looking at the whole picture, it's not a wonderful thing.
The evidence against is work done by amateurs who don't comprehend the effects of the difference in DoF caused by small differences in AF selection, or the focus point in MF, or focussing.on the whole image and not being overly influenced by one small segment of the image.

Pentax has always favoured noise reduction to absolute clarity, because absolute clarity is only achievable with unacceptable noise at high ISOs. Have you ever wondered why using the same sensor Nikon will produce measurably more resolution using the same Tamron or Sigma lens. Yet by the time DxO has run it through their noise reduction protocols and equalized the images, they are the same, or in some cases the Pentax is better? Pentax saves you work. The appropriate response is "thank you very much", not "I should be able to turn it off." Live with it, thier is noise in the real world, but my eyes filter it. That's purity, most of us don't want that in our photographs. If I turn up micro contrast, sharpening, and contrast in most of my bird images to increase the resolution, the noise goes off the charts and I have to blur the back ground. With landscape, that's just not a solution.

It sounds like you are saying you demand more noise and fewer useful images. Those who claim they can do better in PP are deluding themselves. Imaging Resources proves that pretty conclusively. Cleaning up noise in camera as much as possible is the way to go, and Pentaax's solution still leaves you lots of room. It raises the bottom end of the "too noisey - to too little resolution slider bar, eliminating the part of the "too noisey" part that you're always going to have to eliminate anyway, but it still leaves a lot of "too noisey" for you to fool around with if you desire. It's a much better solution than no accelerator chip. The fact that a few people want to mess around because they think they can do better, is neither here nor there. When they clearly demonstrate they can do better, we'll listen. But we'll still have to decide whether or not turning off the accelerator chip is worth the extra effort, even in the unlikely event that they could actually produce two images that showed that the accelerator chip is an impediment, which they haven't. They've only skewed their results by accepting off the charts noise levels that no competent photographer would accept.

When I walk my dogs in the woods, I don't see noise. That's purity. When Pentax says the new accelerator reduces noise even in 100 ISO images, that's working towards the same purity of the image I see in nature. That's purity at least to me. I have no idea what "purity" means to you." Is a noisy image with bit more detail "purity." Not in a human context, maybe from a strictly mechanical point of view. The idiosyncrasies of digital image capture have to be over come, not worshipped as "pure."

[Lord Lucan]

The point about features is that they give the photographer options. You can use a touch screen or the four-way controller, the flippy screen or the viewfinder, the pop-up flash or an external flash, the list goes on.

It does not turn out as simple as that. Once a manufacturer has two ways of doing things, he will tend to downgrade and eventually drop the one that is the more expensive to manufacture. He will claim that it is less popular (not surprising after he has downgraded it), that "No-one wants it", and that it is "old-fashioned" and "not cool". Apart from the problem of accidentally touching touch screens (the touchpad on my laptop drives me nuts), the camera maker will not be able to resist replacing conventional buttons with it. This has happened with the auxiliary controls of cars because once you have got a touchscreen it is cheaper, although car users are rebelling against it.

As for tilting screens, I use mine frequently because I do a lot of copying on a table top, with the camera on a tripod aimed down at the subject. I don't want to have to use a step-ladder to look through the viewfinder (or see a fixed LV screen), and no I don't want the flaff of tethering to a smartphone either.

[Serkevan]

But if you wait year or two....

There are many ways a K-P is already better than a D750. Those things are a given.

The K-new is for people who want the best possible camera with the best Pentax technology, not the best Nikn camera with the best Nikon technology, because almost all of us decided consciously or unconsciously that the best Nikon technology (or Canon or Sony) isn't what we want.

Does the
Take the D750 just as an example....
No IBIS.
No pixel shift,
No astrotracer.
No accelerator chip

It doesn't matter how much it costs, for some things it's not as good as a Pentax. Which is better is certainly open to debate. For some the Pentax attributes are worth paying for, the Nikon positive attributes, in comparison to the Pentax, aren't.
Comparing a d750 to a D780 , two cameras within the same design parameters is disengenius when discussing one brand compared to another with totally different design parameters. That's not at all relevant..

I know all of that, I kinda mentioned the features of the K-New already making it a better camera several times in this thread, Norm

In any case I'm talking about the release price exclusively, and how it might be a consideration for someone who is thinking about buying a camera of such characteristics. If they are already fully in the Pentax ecosystem (and determined to stay) price is of course less of a factor, can just wait until it settles down a bit.
But if they are a casual photographer who started out some time ago and wants better action oriented gear, or someone considering jumping to Pentax because of their OVF commitment, or someone starting out who wants a very solid allrounder camera, then it's suddenly important.
So now you have the question of "should I buy a D7500 plus a couple lenses or the K-New?" And to reiterate, I'm sure the K-New will be *the* APS-C camera. I just think that nowadays the price range and the performance between FF and APS-C is overlapping so much that there's no point in considering them different markets, and then a lot of prospective customers will get into the same mindset where Olympus cameras were considered overpriced because "who's going to pay 1600€ for an E-M1iii when you get a full frame A7R2 for the same money", without thinking about why they were appealing. That's the sad reality.

The D750/D780 example was just the one that came to my mind first, I'm sorry you find it disingenious.

[Cerebum]

The KP is already better than the D500/D7500 in regards to a bunch of things: more resolution, IBIS, smaller (the D500 is bigger than the K-1), has perspective correction, has pixel shift, has access to astrotracer (the K-new will most likely have GPS so this will be native), has access to more than 2 APS-C primes, etc.

Pentax cameras already deactivate SR automatically when they detect they are on a tripod, though.


It's either for video or the wrote SR for giggles to keep us confounded [COLOR="Silver"]

Totally agree on the KP, its fabulous but sr only disables when you change your drive to timed or mirror lock up. The camera has no way of knowing its on a tripod

[Serkevan]

Totally agree on the KP, its fabulous but sr only disables when you change your drive to timed or mirror lock up. The camera has no way of knowing its on a tripod

Ah, my bad. I never use the tripod without the 2 second lock up so I conflated them

[Class A]

Not if they gained three from the allure of better high ISO performance.

I didn't argue for omitting the "accelerator unit" entirely.

With an optional "accelerator unit", one can gain three from the allure of "better high ISO performance" and not lose the one due to RAW baking.

What's wrong about that?

[Class A]

The K-P surprised Pentax, it sold to a lot of customers for whom it was their first Pentax.

Surely, the KP is a compelling camera, not just because of the "accelerator unit".

SO I'd reject that argument.

For what reason precisely, please?

If they lose a few because of the accelerator chip, they gained a lot more because people liked it and the results it produces.

I'm more than happy about the gain.
I'm just arguing the loss isn't necessary.

Every change produces some winners and some losers. They can' keep them all.

Of course they could "keep them all".

If you make "accelerator unit" processing optional, you attract those who like it without turning anyone away.