[mecrox]

Being around in 3-5 years is a good question for more companies with the current decline in sales that is looking to stretch out well into 2016 (after starting the decline in the end of 2012). A FF K-3 would be the safest choice for Pentax.

That's not in fact very safe. The K3 was consistently marked down compared to the D7100 by many sites I've looked at, primarily because it wasn't made by Nikon so far as I can see, and in one incredible case because it was a quote "photographer's camera" and thus a wee bit too complex for the reviewer. Really, you can't make up some of the reasons for preferring your main advertisers over anyone else. Besides, Ricoh would need to drop in improved AF, improved flash, wifi, IBIS, video, a better jpeg engine and so on - thus a new camera wouldn't really be all that like the K3. No matter how Ricoh do it, they are looking at a very tough situation and nothing is safe, imho.

One thing I'd like to see would be Ricoh moving to online sales using a super-duper new website and facing the fact that much of their B&M business is in dead-end stores or doesn't really exist anyway. So a big chain carries their stock? Actually, it just has a few examples on a website and nothing in a real store. What a BS. This would cut out the middleman and leave Ricoh free to offer full stocks in a few select "Pro dealers" only, decent, clean, upscale places with trained staff. These would act as much as marketing fronts as anything else, and if they covered main population centres only then they would cover most of the available custom. There's one Pentax pro dealer here that left me feeling the place would need fumigating before it was safe to enter. You could just as easily find a mummified rodent in there as a camera. This kind of retail experience strikes me as a left-over from the old camera world of the 1970s or 1980s, at least where I live.

[RonHendriks1966]

That's not in fact very safe. The K3 was consistently marked down compared to the D7100 by many sites I've looked at, primarily because it wasn't made by Nikon so far as I can see, and in one incredible case because it was a quote "photographer's camera" and thus a wee bit too complex for the reviewer. Really, you can't make up some of the reasons for preferring your main advertisers over anyone else. Besides, Ricoh would need to drop in improved AF, improved flash, wifi, IBIS, video, a better jpeg engine and so on - thus a new camera wouldn't really be all that like the K3. No matter how Ricoh do it, they are looking at a very tough situation and nothing is safe, imho.

One thing I'd like to see would be Ricoh moving to online sales using a super-duper new website and facing the fact that much of their B&M business is in dead-end stores or doesn't really exist anyway. So a big chain carries their stock? Actually, it just has a few examples on a website and nothing in a real store. What a BS. This would cut out the middleman and leave Ricoh free to offer full stocks in a few select "Pro dealers" only, decent, clean, upscale places with trained staff. These would act as much as marketing fronts as anything else, and if they covered main population centres only then they would cover most of the available custom. There's one Pentax pro dealer here that left me feeling the place would need fumigating before it was safe to enter. You could just as easily find a mummified rodent in there as a camera. This kind of retail experience strikes me as a left-over from the old camera world of the 1970s or 1980s, at least where I live.

Well on being equal to the K-3, I think it is like the K-5 was to the K-7. Lots of new stuff inside, but from the outside the same look and feel.

B&M stores have almost no future overhere, so investing in their presence is just smart when concentrated on a few ones. The same is for paper printed camera magazines. They are dying!

[dakight]

There should be a "family resemblance" and the DNA should be unmistakable but I think an outright clone would be a disappointment. It should at a minimum match the updated features of the new wifi enabled body.

[normhead]

I was just looking at the sample images for the A7s..... I have the A7s image taken at 6400 ISO, and the K-3 image taken at 6400 ISO then reduced to A7s size... the advantage is considerable... that's the kind of advantage I'd consider paying for.



They can't sell me a 24 MP FF with pretty much the same capabilities.

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Last edited by normhead; 01-13-2015 at 07:32 AM.

[Jyrkira]

FF is perfect for wedding photographers etc. You know, you can't have a lens like 50mm/1.2 in FF for APS-C. In APS-C it should be something like 35mm/0.2 for getting same DOF as within the 50/1.2 in FF so it's not possible. Hope you get my point. That's one big reason people wanting the FF.

Have you ever thought that deep DOF can create more interesting photos than thin DOF in many situation (even in weddings) ? Some examples from weddings I have shoot:

läpiteräväähääkuvaa

[GeneV]

I was just looking at the sample images for the A7s..... I have the A7s image taken at 6400 ISO, and the K-3 image taken at 6400 ISO then reduced to K-3 size... the advantage is considerable... that's the kind of advantage I'd consider paying for.



They can't sell me a 24 MP FF with pretty much the same capabilities.

The 12mp full frame A7S is a very unique beast, though. It is a low-res (for FF) high ISO machine. I'm not sure that many other FF cameras would show that kind of difference.

If you take a look at Dpreview's comparison of the K3 to other cameras, the comparison at ISO 6400 to the Canon 5DMKIII does not show that kind of advantage in noise to the FF contender. Pentax K-3 Review: Digital Photography Review The K3 may even be a bit better.

I agree with the OP, though, that the K3 is excellent and completely satisfactory. I have not felt a burning need for a bigger format. I got this at ISO 1600 with the K3 and DA* 50-135. Perhaps the A7S could do better at half the resolution and twice the space, but this shot is not of any less quality than I have seen from a friend's Canon 5dMKIII.

[GeneV]

Or, to go one further, let's look at ISO 3200. At some point, it is true that Pentax may need FF more than I do.

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Last edited by GeneV; 01-13-2015 at 01:44 AM.

[Stickl]

Have you ever thought that deep DOF can create more interesting photos than thin DOF in many situation (even in weddings) ? Some examples from weddings I have shoot:

läpiteräväähääkuvaa

Yeah I have. In some situations definetily yes but mostly not. My wedding photos Hääfotot.

[eyeswideshut]

Strange coincidence that we should get two fins (Stickl & Jyrkira) to elucidate the narrow "vs" deep dof debate with some wedding photography. Both of you have some fine examples of either perspective and I think only a madman would argue for one to the complete exclusion of the other.

@Stickl. From an aesthetic perspective I think your images with only a moderate degree of narrow dof tend to work better than some of the more extreme exercises (like the cookies and cakes). But honestly, I can see nothing that would be impossible to accomplish with even a m/43 camera and the requisite (not necessarily equivalent) lens. As examples of the "need" for ff you have not convinced me yet ;-)

[RonHendriks1966]

They can't sell me a 24 MP FF with pretty much the same capabilities.

Well there is your problem. I think the 24mp FF is the only camera they could sell in large enough numbers to the general user.

[Edgar_in_Indy]

I was just looking at the sample images for the A7s..... I have the A7s image taken at 6400 ISO, and the K-3 image taken at 6400 ISO then reduced to K-3 size... the advantage is considerable... that's the kind of advantage I'd consider paying for.



They can't sell me a 24 MP FF with pretty much the same capabilities.

Many shooters will spend more time closer to base ISO than ISO 6400. For them, the A7s you mentioned will yield less resolution than an APS-C camera since it is only 12MP.

As someone else pointed out, the A7s is kind of a specialized camera that is great for low-light work, but is not the best choice for more generalized photography, and it is not a typical FF sensor. To get a better sense of the effect of sensor size between FF and APS-C, it's more useful to look at cameras that have a similar MP count (or perhaps looking at similar pixel-densities would be even more useful).

But comparing a larger 12MP sensor to a smaller 24MP sensor kind of skews the results and makes it hard to draw direct comparisons. The differences in MP will favor the larger 12MP sensor at high ISO's, and at low ISO's the smaller 24MP sensor will have an advantage.

[normhead]

I was thinking a specific application... small birds and wildlife. Wildlife seems to often be present in low light situations, for small birds I want to shoot at the highest possible ISO to increase my shutter speed to freeze their wings. So that would give me a reason to actually look at an FF. I don't shoot weddings, and all this going on and on about doing that is kind of annoying. And even though the A7s is only 12 MP, it has virtually the same resolution in lw/ph as the K-5, and is also very close to the lw/ph of a D4s. SO the comparison might not be as skewed as you might think. A7s 2100 lw/ph/ D4s 2200-2300, K-5II 2100-2200 lw/ph. K-3, 2700 lw/ph. While the A7s has fewer pixels, it does more with them.

[Rondec]

I was thinking a specific application... small birds and wildlife. Wildlife seems to often be present in low light situations, for small birds I want to shoot at the highest possible ISO to increase my shutter speed to freeze their wings. So that would give me a reason to actually look at an FF. I don't shoot weddings, and all this going on and on about doing that is kind of annoying. And even though the A7s is only 12 MP, it has virtually the same resolution in lw/ph as the K-5, and is also very close to the lw/ph of a D4s. SO the comparison might not be as skewed as you might think. A7s 2100 lw/ph/ D4s 2200-2300, K-5II 2100-2200 lw/ph. K-3, 2700 lw/ph. While the A7s has fewer pixels, it does more with them.

The problem with full frame as a wild life camera is that you need really long lenses, otherwise, you end up with a crop frame anyway. An A7s would be awesome with a 600mm lens (assuming the mount is up to it), but if you end up shooting 400mm or 500mm on both, your high iso advantage could easily vanish away into not-enough-pixels territory. Full frame's benefit assumes a comparison of a whole frame versus a whole frame of the APS-C...

[mikeodial]

That's not in fact very safe. The K3 was consistently marked down compared to the D7100 by many sites I've looked at, primarily because it wasn't made by Nikon so far as I can see, and in one incredible case because it was a quote "photographer's camera" and thus a wee bit too complex for the reviewer. Really, you can't make up some of the reasons for preferring your main advertisers over anyone else. Besides, Ricoh would need to drop in improved AF, improved flash, wifi, IBIS, video, a better jpeg engine and so on - thus a new camera wouldn't really be all that like the K3. No matter how Ricoh do it, they are looking at a very tough situation and nothing is safe, imho.

One thing I'd like to see would be Ricoh moving to online sales using a super-duper new website and facing the fact that much of their B&M business is in dead-end stores or doesn't really exist anyway. So a big chain carries their stock? Actually, it just has a few examples on a website and nothing in a real store. What a BS. This would cut out the middleman and leave Ricoh free to offer full stocks in a few select "Pro dealers" only, decent, clean, upscale places with trained staff. These would act as much as marketing fronts as anything else, and if they covered main population centres only then they would cover most of the available custom. There's one Pentax pro dealer here that left me feeling the place would need fumigating before it was safe to enter. You could just as easily find a mummified rodent in there as a camera. This kind of retail experience strikes me as a left-over from the old camera world of the 1970s or 1980s, at least where I live.

I think Pentax have been doing a terrible job in on-line commerce. The experiences of "web store sales" from the Black Friday sales reads like a horror movie. Much work would be needed to make this strategy work, although I agree with you it makes sense. However, I do believe buying a camera is often a tactile experience, so not being able to see the camera in person affects the decision making process. For those that know what they are buying though, price is the way to go. Amazon seems to be quite successful with this ecommerce thing ... ;-)

[GeneV]

The problem with full frame as a wild life camera is that you need really long lenses, otherwise, you end up with a crop frame anyway. An A7s would be awesome with a 600mm lens (assuming the mount is up to it), but if you end up shooting 400mm or 500mm on both, your high iso advantage could easily vanish away into not-enough-pixels territory. Full frame's benefit assumes a comparison of a whole frame versus a whole frame of the APS-C...

Agreed. Most of my friends who shoot with a brand which offers a FF option do not use FF for birding. It makes more sense to have the 24mp (or so) where you will be cropping. Unless one has some very expensive and heavy artillery (not currently available for the A7S) you will end up with some 3mp shots on a 12mp full frame.