[peterh337]

Currently I have a K3 and 16-85. Had this for nearly 3 years and love it, so why look at the K1 which is bigger and heavier?

I think there is better image stabilisation. This is important for handheld stuff (I often shoot from a light aircraft) where say 1/3000 is an illusion due to the 1/180 *real* shutter speed, and I find anything above about 1/500 produces hardly any improvement in sharpness. But it's hard to find clear reports on stabilisation K3 v. K1. Maybe 1 extra stop? But most of the difficult shots I do are already at F8 (for max sharpness), ISO below 1000 (to keep noise down), and the fastest shutter to get the ISO below 1000.

I often shoot at 24mm, and the 28-105 FF lens which is the obvious (the only, really) candidate for my usage would lose a bit there.

It would also lose a bit at the other end but most of those shots I tend to crop (magnify) anyway in photoshop/lightroom/acdsee/etc and the K1 has more pixels to play with there...

The wifi is a nice practical feature, eliminating the USB cable (which works only with a PC anyway, not with any phone or a tablet (IOS or Android)) or removal of an SD card(s). But only if one can really just turn the camera on and access it from a PC (on the same LAN subnet) and drag/drop. Does that work that way? I can't find any info on the exact functionality of the wifi.

Can the K1 be accessed similarly from an android phone, wifi or USB, so one could email pics to people while travelling with just the camera and the phone? There is no reason why this should not work because the camera appears as a block device, and phones and tablets support a flash stick (FAT16 or FAT32 or EXFAT) which should be the same thing, but it isn't. The K5 or the K3 are not visible to any phone or tablet I have tried.

Does the GPS work when the camera is moving e.g. in a vehicle? I bought the Pentax GPS add-on for the K3 and it is almost useless. In any motion it doesn't get a fix, it doesn't reliably show it has a fix, it loses it easily, and the on/off function is unreliable.

Many thanks for any info.

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Last edited by peterh337; 10-20-2016 at 05:53 AM.

[peterh337]

That means one cannot transfer camera -> PC, unless the PC has its own wifi radio, which is unbelievable for a serious camera!

It means the only way you can come home from say a trip and want to transfer the pics to your PC is to have a tablet which has both wifi and ethernet/USB, connect it to the camera over wifi, connect to it from the PC via ethernet/USB, transfer the pics to the tablet and then drag/drop them from the PC.

Is the wifi access point infrastructure or adhoc?

Can anyone offer any data points on which mobile devices can connect to it?

Android (famously) cannot connect to adhoc wifi access points (such as those provided by some phone apps). It is a google inspired crippling, fixable only by flashing the phone with custom firmware.

[sculptor666]

works fine with android, helps if you have a newer/better phone than i do though. if my camera is anywhere near my pc, it will always be easier/faster to just put the sd card in the pc.

[Scintilla]

That means one cannot transfer camera -> PC, unless the PC has its own wifi radio, which is unbelievable for a serious camera!

It means the only way you can come home from say a trip and want to transfer the pics to your PC is to have a tablet which has both wifi and ethernet/USB, connect it to the camera over wifi, connect to it from the PC via ethernet/USB, transfer the pics to the tablet and then drag/drop them from the PC.

I'm confused: if you're going to bust out the USB cable to hook up the tablet to the PC, then why not just use it to connect the PC to the camera directly and forget the tablet?


How do other serious cameras handle transferring images to your PC?

[UncleVanya]

That means one cannot transfer camera -> PC, unless the PC has its own wifi radio, which is unbelievable for a serious camera!

It means the only way you can come home from say a trip and want to transfer the pics to your PC is to have a tablet which has both wifi and ethernet/USB, connect it to the camera over wifi, connect to it from the PC via ethernet/USB, transfer the pics to the tablet and then drag/drop them from the PC.

Is the wifi access point infrastructure or adhoc?

Can anyone offer any data points on which mobile devices can connect to it?

Android (famously) cannot connect to adhoc wifi access points (such as those provided by some phone apps). It is a google inspired crippling, fixable only by flashing the phone with custom firmware.

Cameras tend to use a dedicated software program on phones and tablets. I don't know if the wifi is in infrastructure mode but I know all phones I have tried have had no problem connecting.

[peterh337]

Let me go back a step...

If I take some pics with my phone, when I walk into my house, when my S7 phone detects the home network (wifi) it starts an app (SyncMe; there are many) which transfers everything in \DCIM\Camera to c:\s7 on my PC. I don't have to do anything. It just happens, at about 10 megabytes/sec.

For the "anoraks" SyncMe implements Samba which is the unix module for windows networking, which enables the phone to talk to windows PCs directly.

Other wifi-enabled devices don't have such nice functionality. They could easily have but don't. For example Sony action cams (e.g. FDR-1000V) do what the K1 does (a wifi access point with DHCP) but use a secret protocol so only specific Sony apps can connect to the wifi access point, and these apps exist only for IOS and Android, and they won't save to any SD card in the device. There is a massive problem here in that all IOS and Android devices have by far not enough space for the typical data size, rendering this functionality useless unless one does various hacks.

I was hoping the wifi in the K1 would avoid me having to connect it physically. Micro-USB connectors break eventually.

And if the previously mentioned tablet was ethernet- or USB-connected to the LAN, then you can get at the pics from the PC without doing anything physically. Especially with ethernet, when the tablet (no phone suppors ethernet AFAIK) appears as another browsable computer on the LAN.

But at least one can transfer images to a phone/tablet while travelling, which is great.

What sort of speed is the K1 wifi transfer?

Vanya - are you using a special app on the phone?

[pathdoc]

It means the only way you can come home from say a trip and want to transfer the pics to your PC is to

...take the card out and plug it into the PC (via a card reader if necessary, though most laptops I have owned have these built in). This is the simplest and fastest method, especially if your PC has a USB3 bus and the card can support the requisite read speed.

My Samsung tablet and cellphone can recognise card readers via the micro USB slot with the relevant micro USB-female USB attachment. I have uploaded no end of files from my K-5 this way and it really doesn't take up much time.

[peterh337]

Sure; I was hoping to find out what exactly the K1 wifi does.

[fs999]

That means one cannot transfer camera -> PC, unless the PC has its own wifi radio, which is unbelievable for a serious camera!

You can find a usb wifi dongle for $9 on amazon...

[MJKoski]

Android CAN connect to ad-hoc Wi-Fi device. Sony A7x works that way when you use your mobile phone as viewfinder. Last time I tried this my phone had android 4.3 version if I remember correctly.

[peterh337]

I don't wish to argue (esp. as it is off topic ) but unrooted Android v4+ certainly cannot use an adhoc access point. This issue is all over the internet. It originally came out when people tried to use Joikuspot (a Nokia Symbian app which enabled the phone to act as a wifi AP; something which most android phones have as standard now) which generated an adhoc AP, but while IOS could connect to it (well, certain versions), android could not. The wifi supplicant code in android enumerates the detected APs and skips over the adhoc ones. Google give some spurious reasons for doing that but IMHO it was done to keep people wholly within the android product line.

I don't know the A7 but all the Sony action cams generate infrastructure wifi, with a proprietary protocol so only Sony apps can connect (e.g. Playmemories, Action Cam). These apps (which also provide the preview on a phone) come only for IOS and android and are crippled to use internal device storage only. It would not surprise me if Sony did the same on the A7 (they like doing that sort of thing) but I am not buying the A7

Can anyone offer a view on the stabilisation, and the GPS? For example, if you turn the camera on in a car doing some speed, does the GPS acquire a fix?

[photoptimist]

Currently I have a K3 and 16-85. Had this for nearly 3 years and love it, so why look at the K1 which is bigger and heavier?

I think there is better image stabilisation. This is important for handheld stuff (I often shoot from a light aircraft) where say 1/3000 is an illusion due to the 1/180 *real* shutter speed, and I find anything above about 1/500 produces hardly any improvement in sharpness. But it's hard to find clear reports on stabilisation K3 v. K1. Maybe 1 extra stop? But most of the difficult shots I do are already at F8 (for max sharpness), ISO below 1000 (to keep noise down), and the fastest shutter to get the ISO below 1000.

I often shoot at 24mm, and the 28-105 FF lens which is the obvious (the only, really) candidate for my usage would lose a bit there.

It would also lose a bit at the other end but most of those shots I tend to crop (magnify) anyway in photoshop/lightroom/acdsee/etc and the K1 has more pixels to play with there...

The wifi is a nice practical feature, eliminating the USB cable (which works only with a PC anyway, not with any phone or a tablet (IOS or Android)) or removal of an SD card(s). But only if one can really just turn the camera on and access it from a PC (on the same LAN subnet) and drag/drop. Does that work that way? I can't find any info on the exact functionality of the wifi.

Can the K1 be accessed similarly from an android phone, wifi or USB, so one could email pics to people while travelling with just the camera and the phone? There is no reason why this should not work because the camera appears as a block device, and phones and tablets support a flash stick (FAT16 or FAT32 or EXFAT) which should be the same thing, but it isn't. The K5 or the K3 are not visible to any phone or tablet I have tried.

Does the GPS work when the camera is moving e.g. in a vehicle? I bought the Pentax GPS add-on for the K3 and it is almost useless. In any motion it doesn't get a fix, it doesn't reliably show it has a fix, it loses it easily, and the on/off function is unreliable.

Many thanks for any info.

The fact that a K-3 shutter set to 1/4000 sec still takes 1/180 second to traverse the sensor isn't going to affect the sharpness. Each pixel is only exposed for 1/4000 of second and will only be affected by uncorrected camera motions on the time scale of that 1/4000 of a second. The effects of the slow-moving shutter slit and uncorrected camera vibration will be in the geometry of objects, not sharpness. A photograph of a perfectly straight vertical line or edge taken at 1/4000 second shutter speed will be perfectly sharp but might have slight wiggle across the frame.

If your images are not as sharp as you think they should be, you'll need to look at other causes such as filters, other settings (e.g., turn-off the anti-aliasing simulator), atmospheric conditions, the lens, and I assume you shoot from the aircraft with the windows open.

The problem with GPS in a moving vehicle is that the GPS antenna needs line-of-sight to the sky. The metal roof of the vehicle blocks the signal although sometimes one gets lucky with how the signals come through the windows, bounce around inside the vehicle, and reach the device.

[MJKoski]

Okay, Sony is Sony. They also added proprietary contacts into flash hotshoe which easily corrode and create short circuit. My first A7r was serviced once due to this. It began detecting devices connected into the hotshoe but nothing was attached :F

I can try that GPS in a car tonight and see how it works with K-1. Though I cannot monitor the green indicator at all times when driving...

EDIT: Aww indeed, A7x created infrastructure access point. Just checked R2 manual I had lying around. Dun remember where I saw mention of ad-hoc setup, it was a review published in 2013 around the release date of a7(r) mk1 models.

[asahi67]

Last August while travelling on Hwy 2 in central Alberta at 110KM per hour and my better half at the wheel, I used my K1 to photograph the driver of a vehicle driving in an aggressive erratic manner. The vehicle I was in was a Dodge Caravan. The GPS in the K1 worked, showing the exact spot the image was taken in Red Deer County.

[peterh337]

"If your images are not as sharp as you think they should be, you'll need to look at other causes such as filters, other settings (e.g., turn-off the anti-aliasing simulator), atmospheric conditions, the lens, and I assume you shoot from the aircraft with the windows open."

There is definitely an issue to do with camera motion, in this application. Hence my Q regarding K1 stabilisation.

However if the K1 sensor doesn't start to make visible noise until say ISO1000 that will help. The K3 starts at about ISO500; at/above that I have to de-noise in Lightroom (Luminance channel) otherwise the exported jpegs end up huge due to the noise speckles, without any gain in the image at all.

Re windows, this is a permanent problem in that application. One needs very clean windows, as flat a material as possible in the relevant area, and avoidance of reflections by the use of a matt (furry) black rag over any offending items, and maybe black gloves.

"The problem with GPS in a moving vehicle is that the GPS antenna needs line-of-sight to the sky. The metal roof of the vehicle blocks the signal although sometimes one gets lucky with how the signals come through the windows, bounce around inside the vehicle, and reach the device."

Sure. I have a composite roof and most GPSs do work in that plane OK. Well, except those designed primarily to locate the nearest Macdonalds, while moving at vehicle speed at most, which is the Iphone/Ipad ones and many others. My Samsung S7 and T705 ones work great. But there was something badly wrong with the Pentax hotshoe GPS.

How is the K1 GPS powered? This is another challenge. It is virtually impossible to do it so you can sort out a GPS fix in the time it takes to turn the camera on and take a shot. So it must be separately power-controlled. Also you don't always want it on, due to battery drain.

Thanks for that data, asahi67. Did you turn the GPS on *while* moving at that speed?