[Rondec]

That statement has been repeated multiple times as these reviews have come out and reminds me of concerns regarding the K-3II and the suggestion that the two bodies would share market space until a successor body was crafted. The K-3's life as an active product would be numbered in months with the last review on this site purchased new being bought five months after the K-3II was released.


Steve

I think we need to be honest and say that the vast majority of photographers would be quite satisfied from an image quality standpoint with either of these cameras. Very few are so well versed in the use of noise reduction software that they could do anything close to the job that the accelerator chip is doing and the loss of detail, even if real, is fairly minimal. People are making a big deal about it, but I still haven't seen conclusive evidence that the accelerator is doing something like eat stars. Maybe it is, but then show that, not some smudged crops of slightly out of focus feathers or fur and demonstrate that it is useless for astro tracer.

I do wonder if Pentax could adjust where this kicks in. It apparently kicks in now at iso 640. If they could make it kick in at iso 1600, maybe that would be sort of a happy medium for people.

To your point, Pentax has not indicated that the K-1 is going away and they seem inclined to keep it around at a slightly lower price than before.

[normhead]

This is almost the opposite of what is true. There is no nature without noise. It is prohibited by the most fundamental laws of nature (if we assume quantum mechanics to be correct). One of the ways this is clear in photography is by the poissionian arrival times of photons onto the sensor: light is quantized in photons, and the photons do not come into the camera in an entirely smooth continuous stream, rather showing (in most cases) some amount of randomness (according to poisson statistics) in their density. A bit more info here.

That said, obviously, there is added noise in the camera electronics as well.

You know if you have to go to quantum mechanics to make your argument, you're probably just being semantical.

Ok, so I should have said "humans do not perceive noise in nature".

I'm not really interested in the technical babble about what goes on among sub atomic particles unless it in some way affects my life. The human eye filters out noise, I'd like my camera sensor to as well. End of discussion.

And believe it or not, the human eye is a natural phenomenon and from a human perspective, much more natural than sub atomic particles, which are not perceptible individually.in nature.

When people talk about a natural looking photograph, it's not one with noise in it. They want to see what they see. Not necessarily what's there. When you talk about naturally occurring noise, that might be relevant to scientists, but not to most people taking photographs.

If your nature excludes human nature, you're missing the most important part. Bottom line, we want the camera to record the beauty we see, not the quantum world we don't see, There simply is no human perspective on that level scientific inquiry.

[Gimbal]

You know if you have to go to quantum mechanics to make your argument, you're probably just being semantical.

Ok, so I should have said "humans do not perceive noise in nature".

You are wrong.
I was out in the nature the other day and there was a lot of noise. Mostly birds chirping away like crazy, and I do believe I heard a train moving through the forest surprisingly close.

[xandos]

You know if you have to go to quantum mechanics to make your argument, you're probably just being semantical.

Ok, so I should have said "humans do not perceive noise in nature".

I'm not really interested in the technical babble about what goes on among sub atomic particles unless it in some way affects my life. The human eye filters out noise, I'd like my camera sensor to as well. End of discussion.

And believe it or not, the human eye is a natural phenomenon and from a human perspective, much more natural than sub atomic particles, which are not perceptible individually.in nature.

When people talk about a natural looking photograph, it's not one with noise in it.

I went to quantum mechanics because those are the most fundamental laws we know, and they clearly state that there is no signal without noise.

In any case, the human eye can and does perceive noise. In low light, you can actually 'see' noise if you pay attention to what you are seeing. The brain is wired to to give noise a super low priority when processing what we see, so we tend not to notice, but we do actually see it.

The rods in our eye are actually sufficiently sensitive to detect single photons with a reasonable probability. However, there is a quite a lot of light lost between the cornea and the retina, and even if the photon reaches the rod, stimulating a single rod does not generally lead to an actual visible even (even though it can be measured that the rod was really stimulated). It is thought that there is a correlation layer in the retina to reduce noise by only propagating signals which have some spatial or temporal correlation, and also that the visual processing centers in the brain reduce noise. After these processes and the aforementioned losses in the eye, it seems the threshold for detection becomes about 70 photons (source for the number 70 ) .

In other words, it is thought that the human eye does a fair bit of noise reduction, both directly in the eye and in the brain.

As an interesting side note, some animals are more sensitive to light than we are. Frogs have been shown to be pretty good single-photon detectors

[normhead]

I guess you made my point there, by writing a whole paragraph on what I already know.
The point is, the eye/brain combination filters out noise.
I want a camera that does the same.

Now if you're going to imply there's something wrong with that, we have major philosophical differences that aren't going to be resolved. You can go back to the lab, I'll go out into the world and take some pictures.

I am not paying for a piece of scientific equipment. I'm paying for a camera that reproduces the scenes that due to it's evolutionary programming my brain finds give it pleasure. Noise is not part of that. My brain filters all noise, it serves no meaningful purpose in the human experience.

All this seeing and filtering takes place within the context of quantum mechanics. You've made your point by pretending human perception is somehow something different. One is not more scientific than the other. But the human part is so complex folks like yourself just pretend it doesn't exist. You claim noise exists, as if that is important to humans. Humans evolved for millions of years without knowing about quantum level noise. It's not part of our day to day experience. And certainly shouldn't be part of their photographs. We tolerate it as a bi-product of a technology that is incomplete compared to our own perceptive organs and produces artifacts our own biology ruled out as a hindrance millions of years ago. If there ever were animals who could see noise, it was an evolutionary disadvantage, because they are long gone. And they certainly weren't human.

Some folks get so wrapped up in science, they forget, they are just ordinary humans like everyone else. I would certainly put people promoting noise and resolution over clean pure colour the way humans perceive it to be in that category.

If people appreciated noise, painters would have found a way to reproduce it. That they work in clean pure colours with resolution determined by how fine their brushes can be made tells you all you need to know about noise. It's negative. Photographic noise may have natural origins, but as a species we learned to overcome it's random and meaningless nature by filtering it. But with technologies like Pixel Shift and the accelerator chip we are trying to teach cameras to do what humans do. Evolotion has already made it's choice. Loss of resolution is better than noise. All we can do is learn to live with it.

If you really want to get into human perception, Oliver Sacks The River of Conscisouness is a great read. It's the "big picture view" of a great neurologist/ physicists life's work

[MJKoski]

Get a Sony R3. It gives better IQ without mush up to ISO6400 or so IF you keep exposure times under 3.2sec. 36MP Sony chip has been ISO100 tripod device from D800 days and this has not really changed.

[stevebrot]

In any case, the human eye can and does perceive noise. In low light, you can actually 'see' noise if you pay attention to what you are seeing. The brain is wired to to give noise a super low priority when processing what we see, so we tend not to notice, but we do actually see it.

Don't confuse low rod-cell density with noise.


Steve

[Kunzite]

Get a Sony R3. It gives better IQ without mush up to ISO6400 or so IF you keep exposure times under 3.2sec.

Does it?

[MJKoski]

Oh yes it does. ISO640 is freaking good thing to have as the 2nd base ISO. R2 already gave about stop better high ISO compared to K-1 mk1. R3 is every bit as good.

That ISO640 was about all I missed about R2 when I switched to K-1. Perfect setting for star trails stacking.

[stevebrot]

I went to quantum mechanics because those are the most fundamental laws we know

Then you are aware that "shot noise" is only significant when photon flux is exceedingly low and essentially disappears when that is not the case. At least, that was how the discussion of Poisson distributions went when I took "Prob 'n Stat" back in the stone age.


Steve

[normhead]

Get a Sony R3. It gives better IQ without mush up to ISO6400 or so IF you keep exposure

Prove it.

To some of us you're just an unhappy dude who projects his unhappiness onto Pentax cameras, so, no you don't get a free pass on stuff like this.

You keep recommending cameras you don't apparently own. How hypocritical is that? There could be all kinds of issues with those camera you don't even know about.

Until Imagine Resources releases it's test images I can see what you're talking about, it's just a mental note somewhere, not a fact. But half the time when that happens, it isn't the way people say it is.

I have in the past used Imaging Resources to correct all kinds of posted falsehoods. So far, I see no indication of anything apart from evidence some people don't know how to use a cloning tool in post processing.

People, myself included can be untrustworthy. I like rock solid evidence. I have made assumptions that have proved to be untrue on evidence like what you're throwing out there, and people have corrected me. It's a human thing. As far as I know you are human. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.

[BigMackCam]

Get a Sony R3. It gives better IQ without mush up to ISO6400 or so IF you keep exposure times under 3.2sec. 36MP Sony chip has been ISO100 tripod device from D800 days and this has not really changed.

This is why we have to be very careful accepting DPR's test shots as evidence without questioning them. DPR's shots don't bear out your experience with the A7R3... see below, a comparison between the original K-1 and A7R3 at ISO6400 (compared at same physical subject dimensions). Aside from the fact that the green feathery stuff has clearly moved position slightly, the noise characteristics are remarkably similar (maybe a tiny edge in favour of the K-1), and in terms of detail - for this part of the test shot, the K-1 looks a little better to me. YMMV, though...

[normhead]

Thanks Big Guy. I always appreciate someone else doing the work, so I don't have to it myself.

Another crazy ant-Pentax argument bites the dust.

---------- Post added 05-09-18 at 12:38 PM ----------

Also see this one
Opportunity to get banned on DPR - Page 8 - PentaxForums.com



Not the most pleasing portrait, but if we're going to talk photographic accuracy, the K-1 Mkii wins hand down.

Your witness Mr. MJKoski. Do we have a rebuttal?

Someone better put on that DFA 50 1.4 "Not a portrait lens, unless you want to see pores."

To me, that portrait is so sharp it's unpleasant. It should be right up your alley.

[BigMackCam]

Here's another DPR comparison, just for fun... This one between the K-1II and and the A7R3. Taken from the central area (since we've pretty much established there's a lens-related sharpness / focus problem in the upper right of the K-1II test image)... Detail looks very, very similar indeed. Perhaps a shade more detail on the A7R3 due to less noise reduction, but then we get the benefit of less noise on the K-1II image. Swings and roundabouts.

I mention this not to discredit the view that the K-1II is performing noise reduction with the potential to remove a tiny amount of detail... indications suggest that is indeed the case, at least from the sources we've been able to reference thus far. But it's interesting to see how little difference there is in these shots between the K-1 / K-1II and the afore-mentioned A7R3...

[Kunzite]

Looks encouraging.

If the K-1 II wasn't a paid upgrade (as I own a K-1 already), at this point I'd be tempted to say going K-1 II would be a safe bet. Yes, there might be a slight decrease in detail visible at pixel peeping higher ISO images.
I'd still like a test checking a potential "star eater" (which I don't expect, given Pentax' inclusion of features like the Astrotracer).